Harvey Mudd College Magazine, summer 2019 by Harvey Mudd College

SUMMER 2019

The Future is Autonomous Harvey Mudd alumni are moving the self-driving industry forward. | 26

RESEARCH AND CLINIC

(RE)SEARCHING FOR AN ANSWER

NEW TECH ASSISTS LEARNING

SPACE STUDY 3

4 6

Parsons Lounge

A gathering/study space shared by HSA and engineering When engineering professor Matt Spencer’s summer research students want a break from the lab, they usually look for a place “where there’s a comfortable couch,” says Ellie Byrnes ’21. One of those places is Parsons Lounge (Parsons Engineering Building), shared by the Department of Engineering and the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts. Artifacts in Parsons Lounge tell interesting stories of the history, collaboration, humor and mystery of both departments.

1. Engineering professor Matt Spencer researches circuit design, with an emphasis on circuits that are not built entirely from transistors. He is working on characterizing ground plane noise in PCBs, simulating emerging semiconductor technologies and investigating applications of radio frequency design techniques to underwater communication links. During summer 2019, Spencer oversaw research in these areas and several more.

2. With funding from the 7C Center for Teaching and Learning, Ellie Byrnes ’21 (right) is studying the link between laboratory manuals and student learning outcomes. Working in Professor Matt Spencer’s lab, Byrnes is developing a detailed analysis of how students learn electrical engineering concepts and how a better understanding of laboratory pedagogy might impact the way engineers are taught. Tejus Rao ’22 is hooked on Spencer’s Fish and Chips project, a continuation of research begun in summer

3. The oversized slide rule was donated in 1988 by William A. Wilson, a Los Angeles oil-drilling equipment manufacturer, cattle rancher and real estate developer. He also served as U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican beginning in 1984. The circumstances of Wilson’s relationship to the College and the donation of the novelty slide rule are a mystery. 4. Robert Cyprus ’17 and Sam Dietrich ’17 made the 3x-scale hammer for E4 (Introduction to Engineering Design and Manufacturing) “for fun,” says Dietrich. “James Best ’14 had the original vision and provided us with most of the materials. Robert and I machined it using the student machine shop.” Cyprus and Dietrich named the hammer E-Thor, a clever nod to the popular introductory course and the mighty hammer of Norse god Thor. 5. Among the reading material available in Parsons Lounge is the time capsule that is the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published in 1910. Professor Emeritus of History Richard Olson ’62 bought the set when he was a graduate student at Harvard and donated it to the College along with the lounge’s other encyclopedia sets, which contain articles by Olson. 6. Every day of his 40-year career at Harvey Mudd, late Professor Emeritus of Engineering Harry Williams rode his bike to work with a lunch box strapped to the book rack. Most days, he and his friends, late Professor Emeritus of Engineering Clive Dym and late Professor Emeritus of Chemistry Mitts Kubota, would meet at noon to swim and eat lunch together. Dym felt Williams’ lunch boxes—usually borrowed from his children and adorned with characters like Kermit the Frog—were silly, so he commissioned a toolbox-style container that he felt was better suited for a grownup. Williams used the new lunch box until he retired.

2017. Tracking fish using electronic tags enables biologists to measure migration patterns, mating behavior and native habitat so as to understand and better manage fish ecosystems. The project seeks to replace existing fish-tracking technology (cumbersome, battery-powered modules) with a version powered wirelessly via ultrasound. Research students modified a prior team’s short-range ultrasound link in order to send data and are developing a method of using the transmitter as an imaging device.

7. Leo Vilchez ’21 (right) is studying ground plane design practices in Professor Matt Spencer’s lab. “Every printed circuit board has a part called a ground plane,” Spencer says. “People disagree about how best to make ground planes, but there is little published data to back one side or the other. We’re trying to provide that public data.” Ethan Falicov ’21 (center) is researching oxide formation on microelectromechanical contacts. “Some scientists are trying to replace transistors with slower, more power-efficient mechanical switches,” Spencer says. “However, the contacts of these switches rust in air, which has prevented big demonstrations of this

technology. We’re measuring the rust very carefully to figure out how to beat it.” Omar Aleman ’21 (far left) is developing hardware and pedagogy improvements for the E79 (Introduction to Engineering Systems) and E80 (Experimental Engineering) courses. 8. These photographs are from the Lasers series by Ken Fandell, professor of art and Michael G. and C. Jane Wilson Chair in Arts and the Humanities. He captured these color-saturated images by shooting lasers through a dark, fog-filled room. 9. Not visible in this photograph but important to mention is the Tau Beta Pi Bent, another Robert Cyprus ’17 and Sam Dietrich ’17 collaboration, which hangs on the north wall of the lounge. Tau Beta Pi is the national engineering honor society whose official badge is a watch key in the form of the bent of a trestle. “The TBP headquarters sells a brass Bent and also provides roughly dimensioned drawings,” says Dietrich. “We machined our chapter’s Bent based on these drawings from a single aluminum block. The machining took three, 10-hour days in the shop (over spring break) and countless hours of sanding and polishing. We then had the Bent anodized gold and mounted in the Parsons lobby.”

FROM THE PRESIDENT

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

Whew! Busy Summer After celebrating our largest graduating class in the College’s history (see page 5), summer began in earnest on campus. Each year, it seems as if our summers get busier, and this year was no exception. Harvey Mudd launched a new Summer Session (see page 6), offering students from The Claremont Colleges and local high schools as well as adult learners the opportunity to register for classes on campus. During the six-week program, students took advantage of our exceptional faculty and campus resources to study selected courses in the humanities, the social sciences, natural sciences and mathematics. The Summer Session occurred alongside Summer Math and the College’s Summer Research Program. Thanks to the generosity of several trustees and friends of the College, we raised additional support for the Summer Research Program to provide critically needed salary funds for faculty members conducting research without outside grant or foundation funding. Nearly 200 students worked alongside faculty colleagues this summer to conduct research in innovative and interesting areas (read about several projects on page 18). Also, this year we provided research awards from presidential discretionary funds for faculty members in the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts to conduct independent scholarly work in areas where external funding has become increasingly scarce. In addition to having our own faculty and students on campus, summer is a time when we host many outside organizations who use our campus for their programs and activities. Along with Upward Bound, Bright Prospect and Girls Who Code, we hosted the Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics (BEAM) Pathway program (see page 7). Through this program, 40 math-minded rising eighth graders from across Los Angeles spent three weeks on campus learning math and solving puzzles. This is the first year a BEAM summer residential

SUMMER 2019 | VOLUME 18, NO. 3

program has been held on the West Coast, and we were incredibly honored to host the group. In July, the City of Claremont approved the College to begin construction of the Scott A. McGregor Computer Science Center at the corner of Dartmouth Avenue and Platt Boulevard (see page 4). When completed in spring 2021, the 36,000-square-foot academic building will house the Computer Science Department on the top two floors as well as a makerspace for use by Harvey Mudd and other Claremont college students. We are incredibly excited about this project and are especially grateful to the many trustees, alumni, parents and friends who have provided much-needed financial support for this effort. Faculty discussions continue as possible revisions to the Core Curriculum are considered. One of the key talking points has been about how the Core can better support our students as they seek to understand the impact of their work on society. This key component of our mission is naturally interwoven into everything we do, but we want to make sure we are being thoughtful about our approach. Through the support of a Carnegie Foundation Leadership Grant I received two years ago, we created Clinic projects that allowed our students to pursue work with a social justice focus (see page 23). From helping to bring solar energy to low- and middleincome households to better assessing the efficiency of the city of Fresno’s pollution control initiatives, these Clinics have provided our students with invaluable learning opportunities while helping them better understand the positive impact their work can have on local communities. We look forward to offering more such opportunities so that all students can have similar experiences by the time they graduate.

Maria Klawe President, Harvey Mudd College

Director of Communications, Senior Editor Stephanie L. Graham Art Director Janice Gilson Senior Graphic Designer Robert Vidaure Assistant Director Sarah Barnes Writer Leah Gilchrist Contributing Writers Jane Fisher, Alyssa Gee, Cole Kurashige ’20, Abigail Meisel, Leslie Mertz Proofreaders Sarah Barnes, Kelly Lauer Contributing Photographers Shannon Cottrell, Keenan Gilson, Jeanine Hill, Carolyn Lagattuta, Cheryl Ogden, Deborah Tracey Chief Communications Officer Timothy L. Hussey, APR

MAGAZINE.HMC.EDU The Harvey Mudd College Magazine (SSN 0276-0797) is published by Harvey Mudd College, Office of Communications and Marketing, 301 Platt Boulevard, Claremont, CA 91711. Nonprofit Organization Postage Paid at Claremont, CA 91711 Postmaster: Send address changes to Harvey Mudd College, Advancement Services, 301 Platt Boulevard, Claremont, CA 91711. Copyright © 2019—Harvey Mudd College. All rights reserved. Opinions expressed in the Harvey Mudd College Magazine are those of the individual authors and subjects and do not necessarily reflect the views of the College administration, faculty or students. No portion of this magazine may be reproduced without the express written consent of the editor. The Harvey Mudd College Magazine staff welcomes your input: communications@hmc.edu or Harvey Mudd College Magazine, Harvey Mudd College, 301 Platt Boulevard, Claremont, CA 91711 Follow Us!

CONTENTS

Features HEARD ONLINE

(Re)Searching for an Answer

C O N V E R S AT IO N S O N H A RV E Y M U DD S O C IA L M E DIA

HMC researchers investigate the changing climate conditions that are impacting the desert night lizard. Written by Alyssa Gee

Look, No Hands!

When will self-driving cars be ready for the road? Alumni working in this rapidly developing field weigh in. Written by Abigail Meisel

VIA TWITTER

New Tech Assists Learning

A recent graduate discovers the nearly endless possibilities for educational technology. Written by Leslie Mertz

Departments 01

SPACE STUDY

CLINIC PROGRAM

COLLEGE NEWS

MUDDERINGS

FACULTY NEWS

CLASS NOTES

STUDENT NEWS

MY MUDD LIFE ROGER HOOPER ’19

RESEARCH

ALUMNI PROFILE: DAVE WILBUR ’68

REUNION CLASS PHOTOS

VIA INSTAGRAM

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Opinions about the content of Harvey Mudd College Magazine are welcome. Letters for publication must be signed and may be edited for clarity and brevity.

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Contractors began preparing the site in July.

McGregor Center Moves Forward

A rendering of the new building looking west from Dartmouth Avenue

Claremont to commence site preparation work, the Scott A. McGregor Computer Science Center construction is moving ahead. The McGregor Center will enhance Harvey Muddâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s position as a leader in developing computer science teaching methods. Computer science (joint majors included) now rivals engineering as one of the most popular majors on campus, and the number of students from the other Claremont Colleges taking courses and majoring in CS at HMC has tripled. Construction of the new academic facility will help offset this demand by creating room to grow the CS faculty, the Clinic and project studios, teaching and research laboratories, and collaboration spaces. The first floor of the three-story, 36,000-square-foot academic building will house a permanent makerspace, open to students at Harvey Mudd and across The Claremont Colleges. The space will link to engineering machine shops, establishing the main level of the building as a multidisciplinary, collaborative hub.

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

STEINBERG HART

WITH APPROVAL GRANTED JULY 16 BY THE CITY OF

Most Mudders Ever The College celebrated its largest class (210 students) at the 61st Commencement ceremony on May 19. HMC continued its success in graduating high percentages of women in the three STEM fields where nationally women are still underrepresented: 49% of computer science majors, 43% of engineering majors and 43% of physics majors were women. Of total graduates, 46% were women. Most of the Class of 2019 is headed into the workforce. Their roles include software engineer, software developer, spacecraft systems test engineer, math teacher, mechanical engineer, native app developer, quantitative analyst or systems engineer. Those starting graduate school will pursue a variety of fields, including aeronautics engineering, chemistry, computer science, education, electrical engineering, math, microbiology, operations research, physics and robotics.

Welcome, Class of 2023

4,045 A P P L I CAT IONS

551 A DM I T T E D

13.6%

F IR S T-Y EAR ENRO L L M ENT

GE OGR APHY

224

33 S TATE S PLUS D.C. AND 14 C OUN TR I E S

50 % ME N, 5 0% WOM EN

10%

CALIFO R NIA: 35%

F IR S T- G ENERATION

MIDWEST: 8%

WEST (EXCLUDING CA): 20% N O RTH EAST: 18% S O UTH : 7 %

A DM I T R AT E R AC E / E THNICITY ( IP ED S) INT E R NATIONAL: 1 0%

NATIVE: < 1 %

L AT INX: 17%

W HITE: 32%

A S IA N : 2 0%

2+ RACES: 1 0%

B L AC K: 4 %

NO RESP ONSE: 6 %

OUTSIDE O F U.S. : 12%

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New Resource for International Students REALIZING THAT INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS

could use more help with all that they encounter, the Division of Student Affairs created the Office of International Students and Scholars (ISS). Formed in fall 2018 and staffed by Evelyn Real, program manager and principal designated school official, and Danny Ledezma, designated school official, the ISS office is meeting the needs of a growing population of HMC international students, who now make up 10% of the overall student body. The 2019 graduating class consisted of 34 international students, and international students represent 10% of the incoming Class of 2023. In addition to international students, the ISS office also assists research scholars, professors and exchange visitors participating in programs that promote cultural exchange. International students must be diligent about filing certain paperwork by specific deadlines, including managing their visa status. This technical work takes priority, but in a survey administered by staff in ISS and institutional research, students shared that they wanted opportunities to have fun

experiences and get to know all of their classmates. “We’re fully committed to the students, not only in terms of their needs related to immigration but also regarding Mudd-specific activities,” says Real. Building community—among the international students and within the entire student body and campus community—is a high priority for the ISS staff. “We’re trying to build those relationships and connections, not just with the students who are from the same regions of the world but also with people coming from other places,” says Real. “We want them to get to know each other and build relationships with each other.” To encourage cross-cultural interaction, Real works with HMC’s Office of Institutional Diversity and other units of student affairs to plan fun events that will help international students experience the local culture and lifestyle. The College continues to collaborate with International Place, a 7C resource center on the Claremont McKenna campus, on activities like the annual International Festival, which celebrates the many countries and cultures represented on all the campuses.

CS professor George Montañez (right) congratulates Vivaswat Ojha ’19 and his family members.

“ We’re fully committed to the students. ” –EVELYN REAL, ISS PROGRAM MANAGER

Sustainability Silver

Summer’s Cool The College expanded its course offerings for a new Summer Session, May 20– June 28. Courses included Ethics: Ancient and Modern (Darryl Wright); Materials Engineering (Albert Dato); Mechanics & Wave Motion (Peter Saeta); and Prophecy, Apocalypse (Erika Dyson). Most participants enrolled this year were HMC students. Next year, organizers hope to see more summer session students from The Claremont Colleges as well as HMC alumni and other adult learners, high school juniors and seniors. Visit hmc.edu/summer-session.

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

Harvey Mudd College earned a STARS Silver rating in recognition of its sustainability achievements from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. STARS (sustainability tracking, assessment and rating system) measures and encourages sustainability in higher education. Led by the Hixon Center for Sustainable Environmental Design, the College submitted its first report last year and received a bronze certification. Contributing to HMC’s improved rating are the College’s innovative research in areas such as water use and air pollution modeling, its greenhouse gas emissions data and Green Fund, and a minimum LEED silver rating (or equivalent) for all new campus buildings.

TRUSTEE UPDATE

Changes to the board effective July 1. New to the board Robert Gould ’87, lecturer, Department of Statistics, UCLA; vice chair of undergraduate studies and director, Center for the Teaching of Statistics Philippe Vincent P23, CEO, Virtual Instruments

Math & Puzzles at BEAM For three weeks this summer, East Dorm was home to 40 math-minded rising eighth graders and their chaperones. The students, all from the Los Angeles area, were selected through a highly competitive admission process to participate in the Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics (BEAM) Pathway program, a free, residential summer camp for students who like

math and solving puzzles and want to be challenged. BEAM was founded in New York in 2011 with 17 students. Since then, the program has grown to serve more than 180 sixth and seventh grade students each summer, as well as more than 400 program alumni in grades eight through 12 during the academic year.

Returning to the board Michael Wilson ’63

Re-elected (three-year term) Miller Adams, James C. Bean ’77, Joe Connolly, Jason Fennell ’08, Kathleen Fisher, Laurie Girand, Murray Goldberg, Jocelyn Goldfein, Shamit Grover ’05, Ellyn Shook, Yvonne Wassenaar, Bruce Worster ’64

Young Alumni Trustee

Binder Prize Winner Viridiana Perez, Shanahan Center Café barista

Shaun Pacheco ’12

AABOG Representative David Sonner ’80, P18

“Viridiana is one of the most approachable people on campus. She always has a smile on her face and has a friendly attitude no matter what time of the day you talk to her. She checks in on people whenever she talks to them and offers to help in any way she can. She treats all members of the community with caring and compassion.” – A nominator for the Mary G. Binder Prize, awarded annually to support staff who deliver exceptional service with a friendly attitude.

Trustees Emeriti Deborah Byron P07 Ann McDermott ’81 Gregory Rae ’00 Jeffrey Rosenbluth Scott Smallwood P17

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VP for Advancement: Hieu Nguyen FOLLOWING A NATIONAL

search, the College appointed Hieu Nguyen as vice president for advancement. Nguyen, who began work in July, comes to HMC from the University of California, Riverside where he was executive vice president of the UCR Foundation and associate vice chancellor for development. “Hieu’s expertise leading large-scale programs in public institutions, coupled with his work for small liberal arts colleges, make him an ideal candidate for this position,” says President Maria Klawe. “He brings an excellent breadth of experience and fresh perspectives to the College.” During his time at UCR, Nguyen managed advancement efforts and guided the public launch of UCR’s first $300 million comprehensive campaign. Private philanthropic support more than doubled across seven school- and college-based development programs. Prior to UCR, Nguyen served as associate VP for development at Bowdoin College, as assistant VP for college advancement at Bates College, and as the assistant director of leadership gifts/senior development officer for Middlebury College. Before joining academia, Nguyen worked in industry for Qualcomm Inc. and Burlee LLC. Nguyen attended Middlebury College, where he earned his B.A. degree in American civilization and was an All-American goalie in lacrosse. He and his wife, Shannon, are parents to teenagers, Sydney and Holden. What was most appealing to you about this role at Harvey Mudd? I spent most of my career in higher education fundraising and most of the last five years at a public research university, and I’ve learned a ton from that experience. I needed to understand both the public and private world of fundraising and to be conversant with both elite institutions and those that don’t have as many resources. When the Harvey Mudd opportunity came along, it was really a point of convergence: I’ve learned enough to apply my experience at institutions that have both elite status and potential. It’s where the future of education is going. As our society becomes more technologically reliant on math, science and engineering, Mudd has tremendous potential. Plus, the College’s liberal

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

arts education coupled with STEM—that’s pretty distinctive. How will you approach your first three months on the job? One of my favorite sayings in Latin is “festina lente”: make haste slowly. I recognize that if you’ve been successful somewhere else, the same formula doesn’t necessarily work at a new organization. I think being at a private, elite institution like Harvey Mudd, we have the right formula and combination to see some tremendous growth. It won’t happen overnight. I typically use the first 90 days to observe and gather information. The next 30 days is used to devise and develop a blueprint plan. Following that, I seek to create momentum and buy-in then execute that plan. But I’ve learned that if I have a plan, I have to have others come along for that journey. That’s really important. What have you found to be the most challenging aspect of fundraising? Fundraising is a long journey. Instances where it’s been challenging are when you’re in a fundraising environment where it’s all about getting to the most immediate need as opposed to a long-term growth strategy; what results is similar to a fire drill. I think organizations thrive better and sustain themselves more effectively and efficiently when they have benchmarks for progress. Creating a process and structure for how we tackle both the most immediate and the long-term needs is important. You have talked about being a firstgeneration college graduate who immigrated to the United States with your mother and grandmother. How has this impacted you? Having come to the U.S. at such a young age (7) but having really strong women in my life has been very important. Growing up, I didn’t know my father. I think my experiences reinforced the notion of perseverance and staying positive. My mom worked as a bank clerk then as an insurance company assistant. I really didn’t have the traditional experience where you wake up and mom makes you breakfast; she was usually out the door. I was much more self-sustaining. By the time I was 14, I had two paper routes in a really poor section of the town where I grew up, and I think the exercise of having to go and collect money from single moms and the

elderly … I had to get myself into a more confident mode to do that. It built some life skills that are important. I was fortunate to go to a private school and to be a student with need in an environment where there were a lot of wealthy kids. It allowed me to appreciate and be proud of who I am and where I came from.

More About Hieu NAME

CHILDHOOD AMBITION

FIRST JOB

LAST CONCERT

FAVORITE MOVIE

GLAD I DID IT, BUT WOULDN’T DO IT AGAIN

FAVORITE FAMILY ACTIVITY

LEADERSHIP IS

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Funds Support Faculty Research

Fulbright in Austria

Endowed funds established during The Campaign for Harvey Mudd College support faculty engagement and development as well as teaching and service. Examples of projects eligible for grants are curriculum revision, expansion or development (including “core labs” and “sidecar” courses) and faculty leadership of student experiential learning programs (research, projects, community outreach, etc.). Here are two funds and the work they supported this summer.

Media.” The mechanisms by which fake and/or biased news articles are propagated are an active area of research, particularly as social media outlets such as Facebook are increasingly being asked to play an active role in fake news detection and deterrence. This work will provide insights into the optimal characteristics of biased and/or “fake” news, which can then be used within a game theoretic framework to develop defensive strategies. (More on page 19.)

Selected for the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, Gordon Krauss, Fletcher Jones Professor of Engineering Design, will live and teach in Tyrol, Austria, at the Management Center of Innsbruck (MCI) during the 2019–2020 academic year.

Brian Butler ’89 Faculty Enhancement Fund

Weiqing Gu (mathematics)– “Applying Big Data

On MCI

Andy Bernoff (mathematics)– “Agent-Based Models

of Locust Hopper Bands.” Locust swarms pose a major threat to agriculture, notably in northern Africa, the Middle East and Australia. In the early stages of aggregation, locusts form hopper bands, coordinated groups that march in columnar structures that are often kilometers long and may contain millions of individuals. With collaborators, Bernoff built two agent-based models (ABMs) of locust hopper bands. ABMs provide an immediate connection to observable biology, allowing comparison with data to infer the mechanisms behind individual behavior. “The long-term motivation here is the hope that the modeling may help us understand which biological pathways, if interrupted, may prevent locusts from creating destructive aggregation.” TJ Tsai (engineering)– “Resources for Learning Deep

Learning.” Tsai is systematically studying the most popular deep learning courses, identifying their shortcomings and then developing a set of resources for students and faculty at The Claremont Colleges to learn deep learning. Adam Johnson (chemistry)– “Synthesis of New

Ligands and Hydroamination Catalysts with Inexpensive, Earth-abundant Transition Metals.” The hydroamination reaction is a chemical reaction that takes readily available molecules and transforms them into significantly more complex and valuable products known as pyrrolidines. These products are valuable synthetic targets for pharmaceutical and fine chemical applications. The major goal of this work is to develop an inexpensive and readily prepared catalyst that carries out the reaction. Susan Martonosi (mathematics)– “Modeling and

Analytics for UAV Anomaly Detection.” Gu is applying big data analysis and manifold modeling to develop new technological capabilities to detect anomalies for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The project integrates machine learning, geometry and big data analytics. Mo Omar (mathematics)– “Internet Connectivity:

A New Research Direction.” Omar is studying applications of graph theory to understand the internet and its connectivity. He is collaborating with Anthony Bonato at Ryerson University, the leading expert in this field.

Ken Stevens ’61 and Claire Stevens POM ’61 Summer Research Fund David Seitz (HSA)– “The Most Famous Refugee

in Britain? Geographies of Race and Migration in Michael Bond’s Paddington Bear.” Seitz seeks to develop a more precise understanding of the histories and geographies of race and migration that motivated Paddington Bear children’s book author Michael Bond to make his titular character a refugee. The Paddington series, which has sold 35 million copies in 30 languages, has become central to contemporary public debates on immigration and multiculturalism. Marianne de Laet (HSA)– “Community Involvement

in Innovative Wastewater Sanitation Technology.” An innovative, circular, zero-waste housing project, Ecovillage Boekel in South-East Netherlands, is experimenting with the prototype of an algae-based waste water processor that intends to turn all sewage produced in the village into reusable drinking-quality water. As one of two anthropologists involved with the project, de Laet is studying user-technology relationships.

“MCI’s breadth on the business program side is a great opportunity to improve engineering approaches in design. I think I will learn a lot and hopefully make connections that will benefit students from MCI and from HMC in the future. And it doesn’t hurt that Innsbruck is considered one of the most beautiful cities in Austria.”

What he’ll research “The [online peer feedback design review] tool is a website that lets student reviewers (or other reviewers) provide feedback that can be anonymized and shared with the presenting design team. At Harvey Mudd, it has resulted in far greater quantity, higher quality and more equitable peer feedback than traditional methods. In addition to removing many of the barriers to sharing feedback and biases in receiving feedback, it also permits instructors and others to see the impact of comments on the design team.”

Why he chose Austria “Austria is a wonderful country with very different cultural norms regarding design review feedback. I’m excited to see how my observations at Mudd and in the U.S. align with or conflict with their standards and expectations. So I have very valid research reasons for this selection.”

Who benefits “I’m hopeful that I can do something that will benefit MCI and its students and learn something to bring back for HMC students. I also expect to learn something new with respect to my research. As Fulbright is both a cultural exchange and educational program, I’m very interested in learning more about and sharing cultural perspectives.”

Gaming the Propagation of Fake News in Social

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Thought Leader

Mudd Prize winner and faculty Chair Tom Donnelly Interviewed by Stephanie L. Graham

TOM DONNELLY, PROFESSOR OF PHYSICS AND

incoming chair of the faculty, joined the HMC faculty in 1997 and, in addition to pursuing research using ultrafast laser pulses as a tool for exploring nature, has served in various leadership roles, including associate dean of the faculty and Core Curriculum director. While away on a yearlong sabbatical in the Algarve (southern Portugal), he was notified that he’d received the 2019 Henry T. Mudd Prize, which recognizes extraordinary service. He says he’ll use half of the $6,000 award to establish an informal faculty gathering, like a weekly happy hour. Such a gesture is one of the reasons nominators selected Donnelly for the award. He is lauded for “mentoring and advocating for junior faculty, epitomizing selfless dedication to Harvey Mudd College [and] being a true citizen of the community.” Donnelly spoke with us shortly before returning from Portugal. Tom Donnelly with research students

What did you do during your sabbatical? I collaborated with a scientist at the University of the Algarve who is developing optical sensors to try to measure sugar content in fruit. I believe there are potential applications to medicine, specifically helping measure Type 1 diabetes patients’ blood sugar levels. One of my sons has Type 1 diabetes, which means that his body can’t control the amount of sugar in his bloodstream. So, he has to check many times a day how much glucose he has in his bloodstream using finger sticks. It’s a very challenging problem to take blood sugar measurements remotely without needing finger sticks, but if you could get a handheld device that could do sort of an external monitoring of blood sugar levels, you would go a long way toward helping those with diabetes. Mostly I spent the year learning about climate science. I’ve learned a great deal and have developed a course I hope to teach called Climate and Energy. The course is developed for students who have completed our Core—it relies on their knowledge of math, physics, chemistry, biology and engineering—and have interest in understanding

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

Hao Cao ’17 and Caleb Eades ’16.

the science that underlies the dynamics of our climate and the implementation of carbon-free energy resources. Of the various roles you’ve held during your more than 20 years at HMC, what has best prepared you for the chair of the faculty position? My various administrative roles at the College have given me the chance to work with some incredible faculty members. From them, I’ve learned about the College’s traditions, the roles of various administrative positions and committees, how the relationships between the faculty, the administration, and the board function, and, hopefully, how to get things accomplished for the College. Perhaps also all the informal, lunchtime and hallway conversations I’ve had with individual faculty over the years have helped me to get to know people and to understand a little bit about their aspirations for the College.

How do you envision uniting peers to achieve the goals of the College? Open and informed conversations are the best way for uniting people. The faculty, of course, is not of one view on most things, so finding a way to get people to talk and providing data, information and context to fuel those conversations is very important, as is being transparent about motivations. The role of the chair of the faculty and the Faculty Executive Committee in trying to unite the faculty is to provide venues and context to facilitate conversations—not to take a point of view—so that people can understand the ideas and concerns of their colleagues. The governance of the College is shared by the faculty, the administration and the board. To the extent that everybody is communicating well, we’re all working toward the same goal—the betterment of the College—and we do that through shared governance. So, it’s a nice tradition, it’s a nice idea, and I think it’s good for the College when it happens.

The College is reviewing its strategic vision and working on its WASC reaccreditation, a new building is being constructed, the Core curriculum is being reviewed, the community is meeting to discuss diversity, equity and inclusion issues—a busy year ahead! What do you consider to be the priorities? I do think the Core revision will continue to be an extremely high priority for the faculty. The Core review is interlaced with most other issues, including diversity and equity discussions, WASC and the strategic vision. The Mudd Prize award citation notes that you are an advocate for a wellbalanced and healthy life. How have you tried to achieve these things in your life? What have you suggested for others? I think that “balance” means different things to different people, as we all have different priorities. The important thing is to decide what balance means to you and then translate that into how you will spend your time. And, of course, those priorities are subject to change from year to year as family, health and work circumstances change. For me, balance is some combination of family, work and a little time on my own (usually taken while I’m running). It’s very important that I spend time with my family: my wife, Cheryl, and our twin sons, who just went off to college. Cheryl and I are figuring out what balance looks like in this next phase of our life—a lot of time just opened up! In addition to family time, I’m a bit of an exercise junkie, so I run whenever I can, which gives me some time on my own to think. I make that a priority because I feel better and happier when I exercise; I’m better at my job and with my family when I make the time to get out on the road. Beyond family and exercise, I love being a faculty member at Harvey Mudd, all aspects of it (except grading), and the challenge there is to not let it become overly consuming. So, on any given day, I’m trying to balance family, work and a little time with my thoughts.

Reappointment and Promotion Promotions and tenure appointments for HMC faculty were approved during the May meeting of the HMC Board of Trustees. Eliot Bush (biology) and Theresa Lynn (physics) have been promoted to the rank of full professor. Both serve as chair of their respective departments. Bush, professor and chair of the Department of Biology, uses computational methods to study evolution, covering a range of topics from sequence analysis to modeling. He is co-author of the book Computing for Biologists: Python Programming and Principles. His software program, xenoGI, helps researchers reconstruct the history of genomic

island insertions in clades of closely related microbes. Lynn, professor and chair of the Department of Physics, specializes in quantum information science. Her research group focuses on quantum communication protocols using photon pairs entangled in polarization and/or spatial mode (orbital angular momentum). The committee also approved the renewal of Ambereen Dadabhoy (HSA), Sal Plascencia (HSA), Matt Spencer (engineering), and Jessica Wu (computer science) to serve additional two-year terms as assistant professors.

In Memoriam

The College mourns the loss of two faculty members. Robert (Robin) T. Ives, professor of mathematics emeritus and Sierra Club Chairman, died Jan. 11, 2019. He came to HMC in 1958, became a full professor in 1964 and retired in 1996 after 38 years of teaching. Ives was an expert in geometry and matrix algebra and was known for his clear explanations, mentorship of students and dedication to the College. Ives was a very active member of the Sierra Club, and his accomplishments were many, including being founder of the Mount Baldy Group (Angeles chapter). During the 1980s, Ives and his wife, Lori ’61—the only woman in HMC’s Founding Class—worked to establish protections for California’s coast and helped pass the California Wilderness Bill and the California Desert Protection Act. The Iveses, who were recognized with many prestigious Sierra Club awards, were married 53 years. Lori preceded Robin in death in 2014.

Carl Baumgaertner, clinical professor of engineering emeritus, died Aug. 16. He became a second lieutenant in the Army following the attack on Pearl Harbor and, at age 20, was promoted to company commander, leading 187 infantry soldiers and three lieutenant officers onto Utah Beach and through France and Germany. For his service and bravery, he received three Bronze Stars and a Silver Star (the third highest military decoration awarded for gallantry in action). He attended St. Thomas College and graduated with degrees in mathematics and physics (1948), then did graduate studies in electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota. He spent 17 years as chief engineer at Honeywell in Minnesota then 17 more in California as director of engineering. Baumgaertner became familiar with HMC and its Engineering Clinic Program, sponsoring 12 projects. After retiring from Honeywell, he began working with the HMC development office in 1985, recruiting companies for Clinic projects, and went on to advise Clinics and teach. He is survived by his wife, Mary, a daughter, four sons and many grandchildren and great grandchildren.

SUMMER 2019

MY MUDD LIFE

A Bumpy Road Paves the Way Interviewed by Sarah Barnes

After struggling in high school, Roger Hooper ’19 didn’t apply to any colleges. Hardships followed, but with support from his wife and mentors plus his own tenacity, Hooper launched a new student club and his own career. As Roger Hooper ’19 stepped on stage to receive his diploma, he scanned the sea of faces looking up at him: fellow graduates and their happy families and friends. Then he saw what he was looking for: His daughter Paige (9) and son RJ (6) jumped and cheered. His wife, Billie, smiled and turned so that 2-year-old Connor, who was resting in her arms and overdue for a nap, could see his dad without lifting his head from her shoulder. For graduates receiving a Harvey Mudd degree this May, the ceremony marked the end of an intense life chapter, the culmination of hundreds of hours of hard work, a mind-broadening education, difficult sacrifice and transformative relationships. However, unlike most of his peers, for whom the Harvey Mudd experience had served as a kind of preparation for “real life” after graduation, it was Hooper’s real life to that point that had prepared him for Harvey Mudd. My dream was to become a fighter pilot, which requires a bachelor’s degree, but I did not do well in high school and didn’t even bother applying to colleges. So I went straight from high school to the Air Force, hoping that I could pay for and get through college while in the military. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, I did not do well in the military. I was immature and made a lot of mistakes and bad decisions, so I was discharged early from my career. After I left the military, I struggled to hold a job, which led to homelessness. I was either living on a couch or out of my Toyota Tacoma. I tried to take classes at Victor Valley College in Victorville, California, but I couldn’t afford it, so I dropped out after my first semester. After a few months of homelessness, I reconnected with Billie, an acquaintance from high school, who would later be my wife. She helped me find a job delivering auto parts in Fontana. But, eventually, I wasn’t content to deliver auto parts for the rest of my life. So I

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

enrolled at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga for the spring semester of 2013. I was determined to be the best student in every class. I joined the honors program and became a math and physics tutor at the college. I was able to convert my classes into honors credit by completing a contract with my professors which required me to do a research paper and presentation at the end of the semester. I didn’t know Harvey Mudd existed until a favorite mathematics, engineering and physics professor, Mohammad Tavakoli, told me about it. He said he thought my life experience made me a good fit for HMC. When I looked into it and found that Mudd had a humanities concentration requirement and wasn’t all about STEM, I was really excited. I was able to complete my concentration in political science, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I am married with three kids and one more on the way! Harvey Mudd does not offer family housing, so I would commute from our home in Lytle Creek to class every day on my motorcycle. Balancing family life and HMC was very difficult, especially in my senior year. I had been taking college classes full time since spring of 2013 and had become mentally and emotionally fatigued by the curriculum and the schedule. Most days, I would say

goodbye to my children in the morning and wouldn’t get home until very late at night. By senior year, I decided go home at a set time every day so that I could at least have dinner with my family. Like every other Clinic team, mine (GKN Aerospace) met late in the evenings, on Sundays and even on holidays. I just couldn’t do that anymore, I needed to spend time with my wife and kids, and Sundays and holidays were the only days I got with them. I had to sacrifice something, and it made sense to me to sacrifice my Clinic grade for family time. My wife (who works from home and home schools) has done so much to support me and the kids through my time in college and hasn’t once expected anything from me in return. MARS-I is the first iteration of the Mudders Aspiring to Reach Space project. It started with a high-power rocketry course I took with Erik Spjut, professor of engineering and Union Oil Company Engineering Design Fellow. Through the course, I earned my level I and II high-power rocketry certifications through Tripoli Rocketry Association, which certifies me to launch rockets with up to L-impulse (up to 5,120 N-s) motors. The class took a trip to the Friends of Amateur Rocketry (FAR) facility, near Ridgecrest, California, where we saw college teams launch some very powerful rockets

and found out that some teams actually make their own fuel. This was very exciting. There was so much potential. Designing our own fuel and motor would not only be a huge learning experience, but also we could basically make the rocket do whatever we wanted it to do, and what I wanted it to do was reach the Karman line, which is at an altitude of 100 km and considered the edge of space. I knew Mudders had the talent to do this, so I set out to find a team of five or six people to build a rocket that would reach the Karman line. Instead of five to six Mudders, I got more than 20 who were very excited about the project! I realized a project of this scale was too much for five or six people trying to balance it with the Mudd curriculum. I created five sub teams: Structural & Aerodynamics led by Charles Dawson ’19, Fuel System led by Harry Fetsch ’20, Electronics & Telemetry led by Erik Meike ’21, Combustion Chamber led by me, and Launch Tower (added in spring 2019) led by Mariah Ewing ’20. Greg Lyzenga (Burton Bettingen Professor of Physics) gladly, but cautiously, accepted the request to be our faculty advisor. Our group of 25 students had representation from every major at Mudd The combustion chamber team was the best fit for me because I was one of two students who had taken the Compressible Flow course with Mary Cardenas, Anthony W. LaFetra Chair in Environmental Engineering, and learned the principles of supersonic flow and rocket nozzle design. My team and I designed a nozzle, chamber and ignition that we believe is viable, although we could really use some FEA testing on the nozzle design. The rest of the group made tremendous progress in designing the airframe, electronics, and the launch tower; the fuel team was even able to go out to FAR and develop some ammonium perchlorate-based test grains, a rare experience for undergrad students. I’m heading to USC to start a master’s degree in astronautical engineering. I’ll be learning a ton about rockets and even how to develop space missions, but I am most excited to work in their Liquid Propulsion Lab, where I will get hands-on experience designing, building and testing liquid rocket engines.

Follow the Leaders Leadership Awards celebrate students, faculty and staff for their contributions on campus and beyond. Recipients are chosen by a selection committee made up of peers who review submissions from nominators. Comments from nominators demonstrate why these students are so highly esteemed.

Dean Sundberg Prize: $500 award that recognizes the exceptional leadership and positive impact of a rising junior. Arielle Isaacs ’21 “Arielle embodies the Mudd value of creating a positive impact on one’s community through leadership. Through positions like working on the Honor Board, as a campus tour guide, club director for ASHMC and a Homework Hotline mentor tutor, Arielle has taken part in upholding the honor code, worked to engage other students in activities on campus and has shown exemplary work habits as a model for peers and coworkers.” Outstanding Emerging Leader: Recognizes potential of a first-year or sophomore as a campus and/or community leader. Aitzín Cornejo-Reynoso ’21 “Aitzín is a student leader and activist. A member of Society of Professional Latinos in STEMS, she is in charge of leading tutoring sessions for local high school students in partnership with Uncommon Good, a nonprofit organization. Most of the highschool students served are low-income, potential first-generation college students and/or Latinx. Aitzín is willing to work hard on behalf of others without expecting anything in return.” Skylar Gering ’22 “Skylar has a deep level of curiosity about the world in general and the natural sciences in particular. This curiosity is coupled with a strong desire to do good for the community and the planet and an incredible work ethic and positive can-do spirit. I’ve never seen Skylar unmotivated to tackle a new challenge; she

always digs in when the first attempt at a problem fails, she seeks advice as needed and works with friends and classmates. She’s a Mudder through and through: in her mind, her heart, and her actions.” Outstanding Mudder Award: Recognizes students who contribute to the community and demonstrate creativity, leadership, teamwork, ethics, inclusion, community engagement, wellness and communication in curricular and co-curricular endeavors. Charles Dawson ’19 “Charles is always willing to help out a fellow student, even a stranger. He is understanding and truly believes in the potential of everyone around him. He takes his responsibilities seriously but still has a sense of humor, and he uses that blend to lead many different groups effectively. He’s hardworking, diligent, trustworthy and kind—he thinks about the impact he wants to have on society, and is motivated and capable of creating the type of impact he wants to see.” Dorman Student Altruism Prize: $250 award recognizes a graduating senior student selected by peers as one who’s done the most for their fellow students. Natalie Kadonaga ’19 “As co-president of the Living Learning Community for the past two years, Natalie has organized events that facilitate learning and discussion of social justice issues in order to address the Harvey Mudd mission to understand our impact on society. Natalie is also active in the prison education project and in the Core Revision Committee. Natalie has taken responsibility and initiative to make Mudd and the community around her a better place.”

SUMMER 2019

CAMPUS CURRENT

S T U D E NT N E WS

Mission: MARS Students in the Mudders Aspiring to Reach Space (MARS) student club hope to reach the edge of space with custom-built rockets. Mariah Ewing ’20 and Kevin Shoyer ’20 will lead the MARS-I project during 2019–2020. “In the upcoming year, we will need to design a few additional components, including some structural components and camera mounts,” says Shoyer. “We need to finalize our fuel composition and complete fuel grain testing, which will give the team final parameters on thrust, acceleration, size and weight of the fuel. From there, analysis on the components will be performed to ensure they hold up during the launch. Then, the vehicle will be manufactured, and testing will be performed on the full vehicle.” A significant challenge to the success of the project is financing. “Building a rocket that will reach the edge of space is not a cheap endeavor,” Shoyer says. Among the largest expenses the team anticipates are the purchase of rocket fuel and the logistical cost

of launching from Spaceport America in New Mexico. The club is supported by the Shanahan StudentDirected Project Fund, which covers about 10–20% of the costs. Their boosted dart design is the least expensive option, but it still costs between $75,000 and $100,000 for equipment, fuel and permits. In addition to looking for funding—their GoFundMe account is hmcmars—Shoyer says the club will be recruiting in the fall to find more passionate engineers and to double the team membership. MARS founder Roger Hooper ’19 (see page 12) remains involved in the project and plans to attend the first launch in spring 2020. “My hope is that the project continues after MARS-I, and that I’ll see many MARS iterations as I come back for Alumni Weekend visits,” says Hooper. “If this project is successful—and I am confident it will be—space launches could become a staple in the Mudd community, which would only further the prestige of the College.”

Spring Sports Recap

Seven spring sports teams (women’s golf, men’s golf, men’s tennis, women’s tennis, women’s lacrosse, men’s track & field, women’s track & field) made the NCAA Championships. Harvey Mudd athletes participated on all of these teams except women’s golf. In track and field, two Mudd athletes qualified for the NCAA Championships: Sabrine Griffith ’20 (long jump; finished 15th) and Evan Hassman ’21. Hassman placed eighth nationally in the 3,000-meter steeplechase and earned All-America honors. The Athena lacrosse team won the SCIAC championship for the third year in a row; Zoe Ryan ’20 was named to the Intercollegiate Women’s Lacrosse Coaches Association (IWLCA) All-West Region first team.

HMC student athletes also earned all-academic honors

Track and field: (USTFCCCA All-Academic honors, 3.3 cumulate grade point average, and either competing in the NCAA Championships or ranking in top 50 nationally in an individual event or top 35 for a relay) Sabrine Griffith ’20, Matthew Guillory ’19, Wilson Ives ’20, Evan Hassman ’21, Miles Christensen ’22 Tennis: Jake Williams ’20

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

DANIEL ADDISON

Water polo: (Outstanding, 3.7 grade point average or higher) Anna Fry ’21; (Superior All-Academic honors, 3.4 to 3.7 GPA) Kaitlyn Eng ’19, Veronica Show ’22

Defender Zoe Ryan ’20 (front), SCIAC MVP

Prosody? There’s an App for That LAST SUMMER, COMPUTER SCIENCE PROFESSOR

Julie Medero, along with Alfredo Gomez ’21, Alicia Ngo ’20 and Ali Otondo ’20 (aka The A Team), embarked on a project to develop an iOS application that would help children improve their reading skills. The resulting research paper, “Reading KiTTY: Pitch Range as an Indicator of Reading Skill,” was accepted to the Widening Natural Language Processing (WiNLP) workshop, held during the Association for Computational Linguistics in Florence, Italy. “This paper is about an analysis of the prosody of children’s oral reading,” says Medero (prosody refers to the patterns of rhythm and sound in text, e.g., pitch, reading speed, emotionality). “That means we’re looking at how children of different reading levels use their voices as part of reading out loud. Our lab’s Reading KiTTY project is looking at how elementary-aged children could be guided through the creation of kinetic typography animations that visualize their reading out loud. Kinetic typography is a form of animation that uses size, color and motion of text, along with images, to represent the meaning of a text. It’s popular in music videos and is also commonly used in videos of famous speeches, but we think it has the potential for interesting applications in literacy education, too.” “The research focuses on two aspects,” says Gomez, who presented at the workshop, “creating the first iteration of the app and exploring how we could leverage natural language processing and speech processing in order effectively promote creativity. The paper accepted by WiNLP focuses on our work using pitch range as an indicator for reading skill as we apply machine learning and other computational linguistics techniques.” Ngo explains how the app works: “First, children read aloud for the app. After they finish reading, children can see their words come to life through kinetic typography. For example, if a child reads a question prosodically, the kinetic typography should show a pitch rise at the end of the sentence, perhaps by positioning the high-pitched letters higher (along the vertical axis) than the other letters. Using our results, we intend to provide teachers with unique feedback of each student’s prosody, and therefore, each student’s reading comprehension.”

CS professor Julie Medero confers with students on her research team.

Ngo continues, “Alfredo and I trained a machine-learning model with scikit-learn to predict the presence of a high pitch in a text, similar to developing text-to-speech software. After realizing that was really difficult (Google hasn’t even figured this one out completely yet), we decided to conduct some more data analyses to understand our dataset. We analyzed and extracted data from 5,000+ audio files of children reading, using Natural Language Toolkit and NLP software (AuToBI and Praat). We found that there is a statistically significant difference in the average pitch range between skilled readers and struggling readers as they read sentences.” The researchers hope to add more ways to gauge a student’s reading comprehension to include reading speed, emotionality/enthusiasm and the reader’s pause lengths between words. “This project is important because teachers often don’t have the time to listen to each individual student read,” says Ngo. “Reading KiTTY can provide unique feedback for each student, so that teachers can focus on improving their students’ reading comprehension instead of merely measuring their students’ reading comprehension.”

“ We intend to provide

teachers with unique feedback of each student’s prosody, and therefore, each student’s reading comprehension.

”

–ALICIA NGO ’20

SUMMER 2019

CAMPUS CURRENT

S T U D E NT N E WS

Two Seniors Awarded GRFs Karina Cho ’19 and Olivia Watkins ’19 received the oldest graduate fellowship of its kind: the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF). Recognizing students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited U.S. institutions, the grant comes with a three-year annual stipend of $34,000 along with a $12,000 cost-of-education allowance for tuition and fees (paid to the institution), opportunities for international research and professional development, and the freedom to conduct research at any accredited U.S. institution of graduate education. Cho was a mathematics major whose thesis focused on enhancing the quandle coloring invariant for knots and links. She will attend a mathematics PhD program at Stony Brook University and is interested in studying shapes using tools from abstract algebra. During summer, she worked as a counselor at the Duke University Summer Workshop in Mathematics, a program for high school senior girls interested in mathematics. Activities included field trips, learning about Markov chains and fluid dynamics and working on group research projects. Cho says, “I am excited to not only engage in mathematics with them but also to be a mentor and to encourage girls who love math just like I do.” Watkins, a member of the 2018–2019 HP Inc. Clinic team charged with simulating and fixing visible anomalies in thermal inkjet printing with machine learning, plans to continue her computer science research in graduate school at UC Berkeley, specializing in artificial intelligence. A joint computer science and mathematics major, she spent the summer as an intern at Argo AI, a company developing self-driving technology for autonomous vehicles. Read more on page 28. Five Harvey Mudd alumni were granted fellowships. Shyan Akmal ’19 and four other alumni were awarded honorable mentions, considered a significant academic achievement. The honorable mention for Akmal, a joint computer science and math major, comes on the heels of another notable accomplishment: the publication of “Quantifying Degrees of Controllability in Temporal Networks with Uncertainty”—which Akmal coauthored last summer as a member of Harvey Mudd’s Human Experience & Agent Teamwork Lab—at the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling. Akmal plans to study complexity theory in the computer science PhD program in MIT’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department.

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

Athlete, Musician, Linguist, Mathematician Havi Ellers ’20, a mathematics major, is familiar with the Barry Goldwater Scholarship—the most prestigious national award for undergraduate STEM researchers—because she was an honorable mention recipient last year. This year, she will enjoy the rewards of being a scholarship recipient: reimbursement for tuition, fees, books, and room and board—up to $7,500. This summer, Ellers did research at the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences in Toronto as part of its highly selective undergraduate research program. She and another student worked under the supervision of Hadi Salmasian from University of Ottawa studying interpolation Jack polynomials. During summer 2018, Ellers did research in number theory (bounding the traces of Maass-Poincaré series) at a National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates at Texas A&M

University. There, she worked with one other undergraduate and faculty mentor/associate professor Riad Masri. During summer 2017, she participated in the WADE Into Research program for undergraduates at Wake Forest University. There, she worked with three other undergraduates and faculty adviser Katherine Thompson (now at Carnegie Mellon University) to study mathematical objects called quadratic forms. Ellers says she plans to pursue a PhD in pure mathematics—“that will hopefully make the world a better place”—then become a math professor and researcher at a university. “The scholarship will help me to pay for my last year of school, and also the process of writing the application has given me the invaluable opportunity to organize my thoughts with respect to math,” says Ellers, a former competitive gymnast who started a gymnastics club at Harvey Mudd, plays piano and is fluent in casual Japanese.

Teams work through puzzles during the first Harvey Mudd Mystery Marathon.

Things That Make You Go HMMM Written by Cole Kurashige ’20

On Friday, May 10, at 1:30 p.m., four sleepless Harvey Mudd mystery makers entered Shanahan 3481. They carried with them assorted snacks, puzzle paraphernalia and their laptops. In just an hour, the first HMMM (Harvey Mudd Mystery Marathon) would begin. We five mystery makers (then juniors Celena Chen, Jon Hayase, Cole Kurashige, Ricky Shapley and Brandon Wada) were brought together by a shared interest in solving puzzles. We wanted to make our own puzzle hunt, inspired by past hunts, like the MIT Mystery Hunt and Galactic Puzzle Hunt.

The First Harvey Mudd Mystery Marathon The first HMMM had spontaneous origins. I was sitting in the lounge of my dorm, passing time between problem sets, when a friend of mine asked me when I would be hosting a puzzle hunt. “How about dead week, the week before finals when there is no class?” I responded. Microsoft wasn’t able to host their annual puzzle hunt (College Puzzle Challenge) this year. Thinking this would be a good opportunity to fill the gap it left, I reached out to them to see if they would sponsor a puzzle hunt at Mudd. They were very receptive, and agreed to not only sponsor prizes, but also to also send swag for participants. And so, Celena, Ricky and I began organizing another puzzle hunt.

What is a Puzzle? Any article discussing puzzles has to go through the difficult task of explaining what a puzzle is. Essentially, puzzles are a very opaque method of communication. The solution to each puzzle is a word or phrase, and part of the appeal is that they are ill-defined. (A more in-depth explanation can be found at http:// bit.ly/GalacticPZinfo). Puzzles thrive off of implicit communication and standards. Meta puzzles, for example, are puzzles which use the answers of previous puzzles in their solution.

May Marathon Eleven teams (around 44 people) participated for over three hours. There were 12 puzzles for teams to solve and one meta puzzle. These puzzles were released in two timed waves of about six puzzles. There were 82 solves total, with the top team solving 11 puzzles and teams solving 7.5 puzzles on average. Teams gained hints on a timer and had to submit hint requests to us via a form. We handled 50 hint requests during the three hours. This kept us pretty busy. HMMM was a lot of fun and we look forward to hosting another puzzle hunt soon. Our plan is hosting a longer one online, à la Galactic Puzzle Hunt or the Caltech Puzzle Hunt.

Solve This Cole Kurashige shares this puzzle for magazine readers. Hint 1: Don’t make me spell it out for you. Hint 2: The pictures provide an index into the numbers. Find the solution explanation and answer on page 41.

This article was adapted from Kurashige’s June 16, 2019 blog post at http://bit.ly/HMMM-19.

SUMMER 2019

RESEARCH

Summer Studies As spring semester ends and the weather heats up, the academic year gives way to summertime, and approximately 200 students and 40 faculty members dive into the College’s Summer Undergraduate Research Program: 10 weeks of full-time research across every academic department. This summer, students studied X-ray properties of magnetic materials, worked on improving robot-human interaction, sought to understand ant colony behavior, analyzed texting behavior and much more. Here are some of the projects.

1. Net-Zero Feasibility for Village South Specific Plan

2. Biogeography of Alcyoniid Soft Corals Across the Indo-Pacific

Advisor: Richard Haskell, physics Student: Katharine Larsen ’21

Advisor: Cathy McFadden, biology Students: Sabra Dunakey ’22, Theo Wismar ’22, Rafael Porto ’22

In 2017, residential and commercial sectors consumed 39% of all energy in the U.S., while only 12.7% of energy was produced from renewable sources. Since buildings use most of the energy in the residential and commercial sectors, some structures are designed to achieve net-zero-energy (NZE). NZE projects use renewable energy to meet or exceed building energy demand. The City of Claremont plans to develop a 17-acre parcel of land called Village South as an NZE development. In order to determine if this is feasible, researchers used publicly available data to determine possible levels of energy consumption and production for the development if photovoltaic panels are installed. By examining completed NZE developments, Larsen learned about design tactics used to achieve NZE as well as energy use and consumption. In their plan, researchers made the case for NZE by estimating construction and energy costs and efficiency goals.

Focused on corals from the South China Sea, Reunion Island (in the Indian Ocean) and Okinawa, Japan, this research is part of a larger project to compare the biodiversity of soft corals at locations throughout the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Soft corals belonging to the family Alcyoniidae are some of the most diverse and conspicuous members of South China Sea coral reef communities, and they are difficult to identify and distinguish from one another, so scientists have a very poor understanding of the overall diversity, geographical ranges and endemicity of species in the region. Using DNA “barcodes” that discriminate alcyoniid species fairly reliably, researchers have begun to characterize and compare soft coral communities. They extract DNA from preserved specimens, PCR-amplifying and sequencing DNA barcode markers, and run statistical analyses to compare community composition among locations in the South China Sea.

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

3. Brown Carbon Aerosol Formation by Photo-oxidation of Phenolic Compounds in Nanodroplets Advisor: Lelia Hawkins, chemistry Students: Ellie Smith ’22, Linden Conrad-Marut ’21 Students work to understand transformation in atmospheric cloud water using an atmospheric simulation chamber (CESAM) housed at the University of Paris, in Creteil, France. The chamber is unique as it can generate photochemical "smog" and multiple cloud events in the same experiment, essential to conducting research under realistic conditions. Gases and particles are introduced into a chamber, and clouds and/or sunlight can be simulated to understand the role of atmospheric variables in brown carbon formation. Brown products are light-absorbing, organic aerosol particles that have negative effects on climate and human health. Students spent one summer month living in Paris and working at the lab in Creteil, then returned to HMC to work on preparation or data analysis.

4. Green Crew Sustainable Claremont Advisor: Julie Medero, computer science Students: Christina Catlett SCR ’22, Vivian Pou ’22 (pictured above), Reymon Pedroza CMC ’22, Alina Zuniga (Upward Bound high school intern) Sustainable Claremont’s Green Crew plants hundreds of trees every year in environmentally disadvantaged communities. A major challenge is finding ways to make sure that residents understand how important it is to water new trees, even in times of drought. Last year’s team built a set of tools embedded in the Green Crew’s Google Sheets records that make it easier for the Green Crew coordinator to engage with residents who have Green Crew trees on their property and to communicate the benefits of new tree plantings. This year’s team expanded on those tools based on previous feedback, and they’ll make the tools flexible and available to organizations across the state.

5. Computational Biology Advisor: Yi-Chieh (Jessica) Wu, computer science Students: Taeyun Lee ’21, Tatsuki Kuze ’22, Julia Qian ’22, Mia Taylor ’22 Evolution is responsible for the immense biological diversity of our planet; however, despite its central role as the most fundamental property of life, the process of evolution remains poorly understood, and current models have typically been unable to span the diversity of scales at which evolution can act. The project goal is to develop computational models and tools to help biologists better understand the relationships between groups of genes and species and thus gain insight into evolution. This work incorporates knowledge from a variety of fields, including algorithms, mathematical modeling and evolutionary biology.

Fighting Fake News If a malicious agent wants to maximize the spread of false information (aka “fake news”), how would it do so? Harvey Mudd researchers spent this summer trying to understand such a strategy and how it might be stopped. Directing the project is Susan Martonosi, professor of mathematics and an expert on public sector (particularly homeland security) applications of operations research and management science. “Modeling and Gaming the Propagation of Fake News in Social Media” is a collaboration with Banafsheh Behzad, assistant professor of information systems at California State University, Long Beach. It’s a new research area for both scholars. “This work will provide insights into the optimal characteristics of biased and/or ’fake’ news, which can then be used within a game theoretic framework to develop defensive strategies,” says Martonosi. The research team spent the summer developing tools of probability, optimization and game theory and learning how to assess the validity of the model against real data, among other tasks. Mathematics students Daniela Elizondo ’21, Bhavana Bheem ’22, Deyana Marsh ’21, and Steven Witkin ’20 (Johns Hopkins University) began with a literature review, learning about how people read and interact with news, how they share it and why fake news is prevalent. They were able to obtain Twitter data focusing on political tweets during the time of the 2016 presidential election. Using a probability model developed last year by Martonosi and Behzad, the 2019 team validated the model with real data to assess if the model is representative of how people are sharing news sources on social media. The team’s model has three main components: bias of a single article, truthfulness of a single article and belief of a single reader. Marsh explains, “In this model, we make a few assumptions about the model: If the bias of the article is closely aligned with the belief of a reader, we think the probability of propagation will increase. If the truthfulness of the article also increases, we assume the probability increases.”

SUMMER 2019

RESEARCH

Presentation Days Amaze For two days each year, more than 100 students participate in Presentation Days, a celebration of student projects representing every department at the College. Faculty or staff advisors worked with student researchers throughout the year on projects that included documenting the history of the College and imagining the future of spring-loaded crutches. Here are details on those projects and a few more.

H UMANITIES, SO CI AL S CIENCES, AN D TH E ARTS

BI O LO GY

SHA NA HA N S T U DE N T- DIR E C T E D PR O JE C T

Control of Gene Expression Profiles within the RpoS Regulon of E. coli K-12

Autonomous Campus Robot

Independent Study: History Advisor: Jeff Groves, professor of literature Student: Ali Khan ’19 Aiming to establish a historical archive for the College, Ali Khan ’19 interviewed witnesses to the founding of the College and examined how the community has upheld the mission statement throughout its history. Working with Professor Jeff Groves and Bates Collection Librarian Michael Palmer, Khan collected historical documents and recorded interviews with 33 people related to the College. HMC community members can access the archive at tinyurl.com/ MuddArchive.

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

Advisor: Daniel Stoebel, associate professor of biology Student: Christopher R. Doering ’19 The E. coli sigma factor RpoS controls the bacterium’s general stress response: a wide-reaching change in gene expression to react to harmful conditions such as low pH, DNA damage and nutrient starvation. With varying concentrations of RpoS, RpoS-dependent promoters produce different patterns of response which can be generally grouped into a few categories. This project sought to characterize the causes of the observed expression profiles. Using an RNA-seq assay, Doering assessed expression across the genome of strains containing key transcription factor knockouts. These knockouts might be important to expression pattern formation, identify the causative agents of the patterns and reveal general trends behind observed expression profiles.

Advisor: Zach Dodds, Leonhard-Johnson-Rae Professor of Computer Science Students: Adrian Sanchez Arias ’19, Geneva Ecola ’19, John Lee ’19, Tianyi Ma ’19, Maxwell Maleno ’20, David Olumese ’19, Andrew Pham ’20, Aomsin Pongpiriyakarn ’20, Willis Sanchez-duPont ’19, Shiv Seetharaman ’19, Jingnan Shi ’19, Samantha Ting ’20 Autonomous systems are emerging in everyday life and transforming numerous industries. The goal of Autonomous Campus Robot is to bring this technology to students by having them build a small vehicle capable of navigating from point A to point B on campus without human control or intervention. The robot had an internal map of campus enabling it to autonomously navigate Mudd’s sidewalks while simultaneously avoiding obstacles. Students saw two potential applications for this robot: 1) delivery for the student eatery Jay’s Place, and 2) shuttle transport between the residential and academic ends of campus. The robot platform allows students to implement cutting-edge algorithms in autonomous navigation and machine learning.

PHYSICS

M ATH EM ATI CS

Experimental Investigation of Grain Dissolution in Two-dimensional Colloidal Polycrystals

Mathematical Modeling of Type 1 Diabetes

I N DE PE N DE N T S T U DY, BI O T E C HN O L O GY A N D DE S IGN

Advisor: Sharon Gerbode, Iris and Howard Critchell Associate Professor of Physics Student: Nina Brown ’19 The microstructure of a polycrystalline material plays a role in determining many of that material’s macroscopic characteristics. The most well-known theory of grain boundary motion and grain dissolution suggests that a circular crystal grain should shrink at a constant rate. However, Brown’s observations of grain dissolution in two-dimensional colloidal crystals implied that a more complex description was needed. She investigated the dependence of grain shrinkage on system properties, such as misorientation and inclination, as well as on dislocation motion.

Advisor: Lisette de Pillis, Norman F. Sprague Jr. Professor of Life Sciences, professor of mathematics and department chair Student: Gianna Wu POM ’19 Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is an autoimmune disease where the pancreas produces little to no insulin, which is a hormone that regulates the amount of glucose in the blood. To date, T1D does not have a defined cause or cure. Scientists are currently investigating the role that T cells play in the development of T1D while also looking into viral infections as a potential contributor. Mathematical modeling can help advance T1D research, specifically with potential treatments, since it can simulate biological behavior without invasive experimentation on live subjects. Wu investigated both single-compartment and multi-compartment models for type 1 diabetes.

Optimal Spring Stiffness in Spring-loaded Crutches Advisor: Anna Ahn, professor of biology Student: Erica Quinn ’19 Crutches are the most frequently prescribed assisted mobility devices with about seven million users worldwide, but using standard crutches can cause pain and injury. Spring-loaded crutches reduce impact forces with the ground and may reduce risk for users. A prior qualitative experiment proposed an optimal spring stiffness of 22 kN/m in spring-loaded crutches, while a theoretical model suggested 4.5 kN/m. Quinn quantitatively tested these suggestions by varying the spring stiffness of spring-loaded crutches from 5.2 kN/m to 14 kN/m to examine the ground reaction forces using a force plate embedded into a trackway. Fully understanding the effects of spring stiffness on spring-loaded crutches may help doctors and patients make informed decisions about available options.

SUMMER 2019

CLINIC PROGRAM

Industry Solutions

More than 250 students tackled 55 projects during the 56th year of the Clinic Program. Thanks to companies like Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories, who received Milestone Awards for the 30 projects each have sponsored, students had a diverse range of problems to solve. Here we share the details of several of the projects, many of them interdisciplinary, presented during Projects Day, May 7. Find more project descriptions at hmc.edu/clinic

CO MPUTER SCIE N CE C L I N I C

C O MPUT E R S C I E N C E / PH YS I C S C L IN I C

EN GIN E E R IN G/ M AT H E M AT IC S C L IN IC

RACECAR for Education

Machine Learning and Quantum Dots

Stretch Wrapper

MIT Lincoln Laboratory liaison: Andrew Fishberg ’16 Advisor: Zachary Dodds Students: Parth Desai PZ ’19, Chloe Elliott SCR ’19, Alasdair Johnson PZ ’19, Anthony Seto ’19, Reagan Smith ’19

HRL Laboratories LLC liaisons: Seán Meenehan ’08, Emily Pritchett Advisor: Peter Saeta Students: Corbin Bethurem CMC ’19, Evan Hubinger ’19, John Jeang ’19, Vivian Phun ’19

Niagara Bottling LLC liaison: Parker LaMascus Advisor: Timothy Tsai Students: Stephanie Blankley ’20, Bohan Gao ’19, Tai Le POM ’19, Adrian Sanchez Arias ’19, Dana ShangGuan ’20, Elijah Whitsett ’19

In collaboration with Beaver Works outreach program, MIT Lincoln Laboratory developed an autonomous RC car with powerful sensors and processing. Using two RACECAR robots, the Clinic team researched and developed a curriculum in which students implement a variety of robot navigation algorithms. HMC first-year students used these cars to test and refine the materials, resulting in a curriculum that will make the RACECAR platform more accessible. MIT hired the students to continue work on the curriculum during the summer.

In order to use electrostatically defined quantum dots to build qubits for quantum computers, HRL Laboratories seeks a three-dot system with a configuration of one electron per dot. Since this process of tuning up the dots manually is laborintensive, the team sought to automate the process via a machine learning technique, namely deep reinforcement learning.

The team developed an algorithm that autonomously optimizes stretch wrapper material usage under quality constraints. The algorithm, compatible with Niagara’s main data and control hub, does this by safely experimenting with different machine parameters and finds recipes that either meet or surpass the goal of 20 percent material usage reduction.

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

Social Justice Clinics

Students interested in seeing the impact of their work on society prompted the addition of three specialized Clinic projects, partially funded by a Carnegie Corporation educational leadership grant.

Local Factory Startup: Claremont Pomona Locally Grown Power A world-class solar panel factory was designed by seniors Nate Smith, Giulia Castleberg, Christopher McElroy, Priscilla Chu, Jacquelyn Aguilera (Pitzer) and their advisor Kash Gokli, professor of manufacturing practice and engineering Clinic director. The students made their own solar panel and toured solar panel manufacturing plants to study machines and materials. They performed a financial analysis, sourced material suppliers and designed a replicable factory floor layout. The state of California approved $2.1 million in budget funding to construct the facility which may provide 6,000 photovoltaic systems for low-to-moderateincome households.

Fresno Air Quality Monitoring and Mapping: Fresno Metro Black Chamber of Commerce

G L OBAL CL INIC

M ATH EM ATI CS CLI N I C

Textile Drying

Historical Imagery Project

Arvind Ltd. liaisons: Harvinder Rathee, Dhruvin Savalia Advisors: Sunil Kale (Ahmedabad University), Erik Spjut Students: Nisha Maheshwari ’19, Alex Ravnik ’19, Sitoë Thiam ’19; AU Team: Varshil Dalal ’19, Anuj Pandya ’19, Het Patel ’19

EDR liaisons: Zachary Fisk, Paul R. Schiffer, Richard White Advisor: Nicholas Pippenger Students: Nathaniel Diamant ’19, Mackenzie Kong-Sivert ’19, Jacky Lee ’19, Vivaswat Ojha ’19, Kinjal Shah ’19

Arvind Ltd. is an Indian textile manufacturing company with $1 billion revenue seeking to increase the energy efficiency of its textile drying process. The team modeled and prototyped novel, low-energy ways to dry fabric at an industrial level and recommended changes to the current process that will help Arvind recover 10 percent of the energy usually lost during drying.

Team members developed systems to search and categorize vast collections of historical raster imagery and extract key information. The complex problems relate to search, statistical analysis, image analysis and mapping. EDR believes that a focused mathematical and computer science approach provides both a challenging problem for students and a potentially valuable product for EDR, ultimately helping to improve environmental due diligence across the United States

The Fresno Metro Black Chamber of Commerce is partnering with local organizations to clean the air in downtown, Chinatown and southwest Fresno. To help them monitor the results, Kaitlyn Loop ’19, Sidney Cozier ’20, Eliana Goehring ’19, Simone Griffith ’19 and Jakim Johnson ’19, with the guidance of chemistry professor Lelia Hawkins and environmental design professor Tanja Srebotnjak, implemented low-cost sensors to visualize the fine particulate pollutant concentration.

Automating an Engine to Extract Educational Priorities for Workforce City Innovation: PilotCity To support a Clinic-type program for high school students in Alameda County schools, the Clinic team developed software and algorithms to automate PilotCity programming. Selasi Adedze ’19, Aanya Alwani ’19, Madison Hobbs SCR ’19, Evan Liang ’20 and Dominique Macias ’19, guided by liaison Derick Lee and team advisors Hixon Center Director Tanja Srebotnjak and math professor Talithia Williams, used topic modeling to extract educational priorities from community college and high school syllabi and inform work-based learning partnerships.

SUMMER 2019

(RE)SEARCHING FOR AN ANSWER The desert night lizard loves the desert heat. But are changing climate conditions a threat to its existence? HMC researchers investigate. WRITTEN BY ALYSSA GEE

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

HIS SUMMER, STEPHEN ADOLPH AND HIS

students sought to answer a question: How will the desert night lizard Xantusia vigilis respond in space and time to predicted climate change in California? Xantusia vigilis are Southern California natives found mainly in the Mojave Desert, often beneath Joshua tree logs. Measuring (up to 2.75 inches) long, their granular scales are rather drab (olive, gray or brown) except for a distinctive narrow beige stripe edged in black extending from eye to shoulder. Adolph’s interest in Xantusia vigilis relates to his longtime fascination with ecology and lizards. The Stuart Mudd Professor of Biology has multiple published articles regarding temperature and its effects on lizard reproduction, growth and survival that have implications for how climate change may affect animal populations. With the help of his team, Adolph was able to further his understanding of how animals respond to thermal environmental change. Students spent the summer researching and creating predictive models of this lizard’s geographical distribution with the help of GIS and other spatial statistical methods. With existing datasets, the team was able to look at what new predictions could be made for this species. “We are relying on datasets that researchers have collected for decades, centuries even, on this species,” Adolph says. HMC researchers have access to over 6,000 records on the Xantusia vigilis, and the team used all applicable datasets to further the accuracy of their prediction models. Their goal was to learn more about Xantusia vigilis’ natural population dynamics and determine what the distribution of the lizards may be in the future based on the temperature and rainfall characteristics of certain deserts. “We find the entire set of climate conditions that are included everywhere these lizards are known to live and then find out if those climate conditions occur elsewhere,” says Adolph. “Are there similar precipitation and temperature conditions in other places where those lizards are not found?” To answer this question, Kyra Clark ’22, Sarah Halvorsen ’21 and Daniel Furman ’20 (University of Pennsylvania) worked 40 hours a week on multiple datasets along with reading and research in order to accurately predict population dynamics. They manipulated the format of each dataset to ensure uniformity—i.e., all dates are recorded as monthday-year—before they were able to move forward

Sarah Halvorsen ’21 replaces temperature sensors under Joshua tree logs.

with their work. When dealing with the climate datasets, the students considered that not all cities have weather stations to record data, so the sets are just estimates. The students created multiple predictive models in order to determine which model produces the most accurate results, and they learned that each set is different. Some models are more lenient than others and produce different answers, because one may predict a larger geographical range for the species than another. The team found the relationship between Xantusia vigilis and precipitation to be intriguing the more they learned. “Going into this project, primary literature by Zweifel and Lowe showed that the lizard’s birth rate was strongly and positively correlated with rainfall,” says Sarah Halvorsen. “However, as we’ve been developing our niche models, we have found that Xantusia’s presence is correlated with low rainfall. It has been interesting to discover so many ways to look at just one environmental variable, especially since California might become more prone to drought in the future.”

General Logistic Regression Distribution

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PRESENCE LOCATION

SUMMER 2019

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

When will self-driving cars be ready for the road? Depends on who you ask. Harvey Mudd alumni, who work at established companies and recent startups, are perfecting the technology that will change the way we interact with our cars. WRITTEN BY ABIGAIL MEISEL, SARAH BARNES, LEAH GILCHRIST AND STEPHANIE L. GRAHAM

HE SELF-DRIVING SPACE IS BURGEONING

thanks, in part, to the innovations of Harvey Mudd alumni. Their experience and expertise across disciplines are invaluable to making the autonomous vehicle (AV) reliable, attainable and safe. Today, Americans drive over three trillion miles per year and the AV industry wants to capture those miles. Two major challenges facing the industry—especially in dense urban landscapes like San Francisco, where many AV enterprises are headquartered—are the AV’s abilities to perceive the road accurately within centimeters and to make split-second decisions. The holy grail of AV companies is reaching Level 5 in autonomy: totally self-driving vehicles. To achieve this, AVs must have the right sensors and software to control and navigate driverless in a social and legal climate that is demanding of safety and skeptical that AVs can attain the performance of human drivers. No company is there yet. All are working furiously to be the first to reach that goal, and Mudd alumni are the problem solvers who stand at the fore of an industry developing at warp speed. “My sense is that the legal hurdles are much lower than the technological ones,” says Michael

Reynolds ’04. Before joining the consumer law section of the California Attorney General’s office in 2017, he worked at the corporate firm O’Melveny & Meyers counseling startups and car makers about legal and regulatory issues with AVs. Noticing a dearth of legal and technical expertise in the field of vehicle automation, he helped establish the firm’s first AV group in 2015. According to Reynolds, the federal regulators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration have taken a hands-off approach to vehicle automation. “The reason we don’t see true self-driving or autonomous vehicles on the roads today is because the technology isn’t safe enough, not because of regulation,” he says. He points to many potential advantages of AVs, including decreasing traffic deaths, increasing mobility for disabled people and the elderly, reducing congestion and possibly reducing carbon emissions. “Autonomous vehicles hold a lot of promise, but it’s all a little theoretical right now,” he says. Can AV companies move beyond promise to profit? Here are some insights from alumni who work in the industry.

SUMMER 2019

ARGO AI Founded by former leaders from Google and Uber, Argo AI launched its third-generation, self-driving fleet earlier this year. With major investments from Ford Motor Company and Volkswagen and research partnerships with Georgia Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University, Argo is road testing in four major cities, including Palo Alto, California, where Olivia Watkins ’19 interned.

Olivia Watkins ’19 Detection intern

UBER Since 2016, Uber has invested nearly $1 billion in its autonomous vehicle group, bringing on new hires, like HMC alumni, who advance AV technologies to make safe, reliable vehicles.

intelligence in ways that improve the quality of life responsibly and compassionately,” he says.

Daniel Gruver ’05 Senior program manager, Uber ATG

Eric Huang ’02 Senior machine learning systems engineer, self-driving vehicles Uber Advanced Technologies Group (ATG)

At Uber since 2017, Huang leverages his training and experience in artificial intelligence and software engineering to build scalable systems that support machine learning for self-driving cars. He thinks about AVs beyond the boundaries of science and technology, viewing them in a broader societal context. “The scope and immediacy of the impact of self-driving technology on society is one of the most exciting aspects of my work,” he says. “I’m interested in problems that have the potential to disrupt society, so the self-driving industry is a good match for me.” He is fascinated to witness these impacts firsthand in legal, political and social landscapes— all of which are changing to accommodate the new technologies. After earning his PhD in computer science at UCLA in 2010, Huang worked in both academia and industry, landing at LinkedIn in 2014 before being recruited by Uber. A musician as well as a scientist and engineer (Huang double majored in computer science and music at Mudd), he’s got an interesting perspective on the industry. “I’m applying artificial

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

A research engineer, Gruver innovates new technologies for AV sensing systems. He’s been managing people and projects at Uber since 2016, working on improving the potential benefits to safety and convenience, both paramount to creating this new mode of transportation. Gruver says that he’s drawn to his work by the breadth of technical, operational and logistical challenges. Drawing on his HMC education— “something from nearly every class I took across every discipline”—Gruver has been working on self-driving vehicles since 2009 and did research and development at Google and Otto before coming to Uber. There’s been a lot of progress, he says, but he acknowledges that there are some fundamental challenges. “When I started in 2009, [the AV industry] was mostly a research area, and companies were just starting to look at turning it into a scalable product. The complexity of the challenge is still large, the business case is still clear and the societal benefits are still significant.” According to Gruver, there’s been a lot of progress in areas like vehicle platforms, data management and more robust compute architectures, but he sees room for significant advances in sensing, algorithms and system validation.

The joint computer science and mathematics major and NSF Graduate Research Fellowship recipient thinks autonomous vehicles “could be huge in helping reduce driving accidents and saving lives,” she says. “Also, I personally would prefer the convenience of being able to read or sleep in my car while it drives.” During her summer at Argo AI, she worked on helping the self-driving car detect emergency vehicle sirens so it could move out of the way. She notes that while safety is a concern for all of the AV industry, Argo seems to have a special focus on the wellbeing of passengers and the public, utilizing what they call “the world’s most rigorous driving school" for its vehicles. The time she spent at Argo before beginning graduate studies in CS/artificial intelligence at UC Berkeley allowed her to reflect on the ethics of AVs as well. “There are definitely ethical issues around safety, like how robust a system has to be before we put it on the road,” she says. “There’s also a privacy issue regarding the data collected. In my project, for instance, we had to deal with the fact that the microphones we used to pick up sirens might also pick up some human conversations (inside or outside the car), and we spent some time discussing the best way to extract data from these mics without violating people’s privacy.”

MAY MOBILITY May Mobility, an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based startup, is developing self-driving shuttles for environments that require low-speed applications, including college and corporate campuses and central business districts. May—which was founded with $11.5 million seed money from the autonomous vehicle investment departments of Toyota and BMW—develops the software for its vehicles, which it owns and operates. So far, they’ve successfully deployed their shuttles in Columbus, Ohio; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Providence, Rhode Island; and Detroit, Michigan.

Sean Messenger ’15 Senior robotics engineer

Sean Messenger was firmly rooted in academia before he veered into industry via a startup co-founded by Edwin Olson, a professor in the robotics PhD program at the University of Michigan, where Messenger earned a master’s degree in robotics. Under Olson, Messenger worked on mapping and multiagent autonomy, but he was drawn to Olson’s hands-on approach to the autonomous vehicle market. “[Olson felt] we should be fulfilling a transportation need, not pursuing a technological curiosity. We should be in this domain, first and foremost, giving value and not just doing a research project. We should be taking the technology we have today and applying it to problems we can solve,” Messenger says. Messenger, who’s been at May for two years, started out working on the fuel system stack, then on the perception side of what the car “sees.” Now, he specializes in simulation and validation for the autonomous system. “Is there a car in front, a pedestrian on the sidewalk, a dog jumping into the road?” Messenger explains. “We embrace involving attendants as part of the safe development of autonomous vehicles. We also embrace operating in real environments, with real riders, solving a real need. We have cars driving on public roads in four different cities today taking everyday passengers around. It’s not a niche experience for them. It’s the realization of filling a transportation need and getting people from one place to another.”

Aman Fatehpuria ’18 and Sean Messenger ’15

May Mobility’s shuttles—Messenger describes them as “souped-up, luxury-style golf carts”—have six seats, some of them turned backward to facilitate socializing (campfire seating), and go between 10 and 25 miles per hour. “We’re not targeting the high-speed market,” he says. “High-speed operation comes with high risk exposure simply due to the speed of all involved vehicles and pushes the limits of existing sensor technology. Our choice of targeting low-speed operation, on the other hand, allows us to design for some particularly challenging situations, such as stop signs and pedestrian interactions, while leveraging use of sensor technology that already exists,” says Messenger.

Aman Fatehpuria ’18 Field autonomy engineer

Aman Fatehpuria was recruited by Messenger at an HMC Job Fair and went to work at May Mobility after graduation. He travels ahead to the sites where May’s shuttles run before they are deployed and lays the groundwork for a smooth rollout. Fatehpuria

also maintains vehicles in the field. Based in Ann Arbor, he spends about 50 percent of his time traveling to sites, gathering data about an area to send back to May’s robotics team so they can program the vehicles to navigate a specific landscape. He also does considerable outreach to the communities where the shuttles are being deployed. “I prepare the public by educating them about AVs and try to ease them in because many people are wary about riding in self-driving vehicles,” he says. His passion project has been the route that opened in Providence, Rhode Island, last May. The shuttle solved a headache for the thousands of commuters who travel Amtrak’s 42-mile route between Boston and Providence every day. After arriving at the Providence Amtrak station, commuters hailed rides to the city’s municipal bus station to complete the commute to their jobs. May’s shuttles linking trains and buses simplified their lives. “This is a perfect example of solving a real problem with AVs,” says Fatehpuria.

SUMMER 2019

CRUISE Cruise, the self-driving division of General Motors, is designing a car service that can navigate complex urban terrain, such as the streets of San Francisco, where the company is located. Cruise is increasing the size of its test fleet so it can collect enough data to launch its line of safe, self-driving, all-electric vehicles.

Paul Wais ’07 Software engineer (2015–May 2019)

At Cruise, Wais worked both on- and off-car. As an early member of the engineering team, he built the first Apache Spark cluster, which was used to mine data for its computer vision training dataset and for ad-hoc, retrospective, fleet-wide studies. Spark continues to be a useful tool for the data science and product integrity teams responsible for computing and monitoring key top-line fleet metrics. Wais worked mostly on computer vision while at Cruise. He shipped and served as team lead for Visual Freespace, worked on emergency vehicle recognition and traffic lights, made contributions to the vision-based object detection stack and joined Cruise’s community outreach team as a high school CS instructor. “I also spent about a year working full-stack on vision-based near-field sensing for pedestrians and small obstacles.” He says perception is the main unknown in driving today. “What sort of deep learning model will it take to detect and forecast the motion of every other player on the road? Nobody has yet built a system that exhibits human-level performance for city or even suburban driving. It is this challenge that sparks the gold rush of engineering effort towards self-driving.” According to Wais, engineers inside and outside the self-driving space are required to make significant decisions regarding data and model performance. “Within self-driving, there is a race to collect the largest dataset, since perception models underperform safety targets today and it is expected that more data will make the models perform better,” he says. “However, the proposition that more driving will yield better models is only a hypothesis. There are empirical results warranting hope (and exciting large investment), but no theoretical guarantees on the minimum data it will take for a deep model to outperform a human.”

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

–PAUL WAIS ’07

He believes that the hardest problem in the self-driving industry is not that of software but of getting diversely talented individuals to work together as a team. He learned that skill, he says, in the Science, Technology, and Society class at HMC. “It provided excellent preparation for understanding the challenges of teamwork.”

Wais is also concerned about how the selfdriving industry handles public safety and is an advocate of open-source software that would allow “concrete, effective conversations about the safety of self-driving systems.”

FORD MOTOR COMPANY From the release of the Model T to the introduction of assembly-line production and the eight-hour workday, Ford’s products and business practices have shaped vehicle manufacturing and American society for more than 100 years. The company is working on fully self-driving cars in partnership with Argo AI and Ford AV LLC.

Shreyasha Paudel ’14 Perception research engineer

Having worked as a summer intern at Ford, Paudel had a good understanding of company culture and the types of projects she’d be working on when she

joined the company full time in 2016. “My work is right between research and application,” she says. “I get to read the most recent academic work and interact with the field. And I get to choose how to apply that research into solving some real problems.” As a research engineer for the sensor fusion and perception team, Paudel develops algorithms to understand the signals from each of the various sensors in the car (cameras, lidar, radar) and combines them in a reliable way so that a driver or a computer can make driving decisions. She says, “My research focuses on robustness in perception algorithms for driving assistance features, so I

am trying to understand where our sensors and algorithms work and how to identify when the algorithms may not work properly.” Paudel is part of a team building automated features for driver assistance systems and autonomous vehicles, improving safety and comfort for passengers. “Self-driving cars bring a lot of advantages in mobility opportunity for people who can’t or do not want to drive,” she says. “We should use our wariness to make sure that the technology is developed safely and with user empowerment and privacy as a focus.”

CARMERA To drive safely, AVs must be able to navigate the road with high-definition maps that give a detailed representation of the surrounding environment, from stop signs to lane markings. CARMERA is a startup dedicated solely to the HD-mapping challenge.

Audrey Lawrence ’11 Engineering manager

Lawrence is somewhat of a veteran in the AV industry. She started at Uber (smartphone sensor data team) then moved to Cruise (data infrastructure team) before joining CARMERA this year. Lawrence now manages geospatial engineers who are responsible for building, storing and updating 3-D maps. She was attracted to CARMERA’s approach of serving as a map provider for automotive manufacturers, self-driving car services and AV research institutions and its philosophy that sharing data is best for everyone. HD maps enable the safe operation of selfdriving cars by building a detailed representation

of the surrounding environment. Drivers know exactly where they are in a lane, zeroing in on an AV’s location to within a few centimeters. The precise maps enable vehicles to navigate complex environments, such as densely populated cities or rough weather conditions, by detecting critical changes in real-time. “Traditionally, this approach for both localization and navigation has been costly to create and update,” she says. “It requires expensive vehicle hardware to scan the roads, followed by machine and human effort to annotate this data. I believe there will be a number of winners in the self-driving space and that the best approach is to share data for map creation to ensure that all have the most up-to-date and safest data.” Maps change constantly, so to feed this need for current information, CARMERA partners with fleets across the United States to collect imagery data and detect changes to the underlying map. CARMERA is partnering to scale its map creation infrastructure and deliver custom maps based on a company’s AV platform. The company is also “building out systems to detect map changes and pushing these detection

Audrey Lawrence ’11

systems to cheaper hardware so devices can be widely deployed,” she says. Lawrence’s macro view of the industry? “I believe that self-driving cars have the potential to make roads much, much safer.”

SUMMER 2019

NEW TECH ASSISTS LEARNING A recent graduate discovers the nearly endless possibilities for educational technology. WRITTEN BY LESLIE MERTZ PHOTO BY CAROLYN LAGATTUTA, UC SANTA CRUZ

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

NE SEMESTER IN PROFESSOR ZACHARY DODDS’

computer science lab at Harvey Mudd College was all it took to hook Veronica Rivera ’17 on doing research and finding new ways to learn. And she’s been doing both ever since. That includes designing new learning technology for children with autism, for college students and for job-seeking adults. During her sophomore year in Dodds’ lab, Rivera and four other students teamed up on a project to create a cameraequipped robot capable of reading a three-dimensional map and navigating a space on its own. “I liked how collaborative the atmosphere felt, working on a big project with other students and doing it while we were still learning (the basic) ideas and receiving support from a great mentor, such as Professor Dodds,” she says. After she earned her joint computer science and math degree from HMC in 2017, Rivera joined a research group that was exploring a new educational approach for children with autism. Part of the Assistive Sociotechnical Solutions for Individuals with Special Needs (ASSIST) Lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), the group was doing the groundwork for a system that would employ facial recognition software to read a child’s emotional state and then respond in a way that inspired further learning, she explains. “For example, if a child was working on an educational iPod game, the idea was for the technology to detect that he was sad or frustrated. The technology would then respond by prompting the child or repeating information, or by telling the child to take a step back and do some other small activities to get him back on track so he could then complete the educational activity.” Rivera contributed to the ASSIST lab for nearly a year with much of her time spent interviewing teachers, school psychologists and speech language pathologists about different techniques they use to facilitate learning. That opened her eyes to the science of education and got her thinking about how educational technology could be used to reach a broad audience, which in turn, led her to UCSC Professor David Lee’s Tech4Good lab. The Tech4Good lab specializes in social computing, or the use of computer systems to reach and connect people. In particular, Rivera was intrigued by the lab’s Causeway project. Causeway is a wide-ranging educational technology that endeavors to help college students learn marketable skills while also providing an online but real-world, hands-on experience—the kind of experience that students need in order to land their first internships or first jobs, says Rivera, who officially joined the Causeway team in January. The Causeway platform works like this: A marketable skill, such as webpage development, is broken down into a series of online tasks that students learn and complete one by one. The tasks are designed to be simple at first and increase in

complexity, so as a student completes one they move on to a new and more advanced task, ultimately learning the skill from start to finish, explains Rivera, who has not only been helping to design a trial of the platform, which is set for this fall, but is also now devoting her doctoral-dissertation research to this project. For the upcoming trial of Causeway, students will be going through a stepped series of tasks, each approximately two hours in duration, and, once they complete all the tasks, they will have built a webpage. As Causeway gets up and running, the research group will be partnering with community nonprofit organizations, so that the work the participating students complete—for instance, the webpage they developed—will be something the organization actually needs. As a result, students who go through the Causeway platform will not only be able to add the newly acquired skill to their resumes but will also have the opportunity to beef up the experience section of their resumes with this real-world contribution to a nonprofit organization. As Rivera and other members of the UCSC Tech4Good Lab continue building out the Causeway platform for college students, they are working toward expanding it to include skills well beyond web development and are also looking into opening the platform to the larger audience of job-seekers who would like to gain skills and experience to help them land new jobs or promotions, she says. In addition, the research group hopes to add a mentorship component to the platform. “We are designing it so that as you progress through different tasks, you also gain more responsibility over the project and move up a hierarchy,” she says. “The idea there is for people who are higher in the hierarchy to serve as mentors for the people who are just starting out. We’re examining a variety of mentorship structures by designing different types of chat interfaces into the platform.” The group is also exploring the option of pairing students who are at the same level, so they can essentially mentor and support one another. While all this work is progressing, Rivera is thinking about adding yet another layer to her research by studying career mobility among workers in online labor markets. This includes markets such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, in which workers go to websites and sign up to do simple, repetitive and usually very low-paid computer tasks that require little thought, like identifying and labeling objects in photos. Consequently, these workers “don’t

Veronica Rivera ’17

necessarily get to build new skills like we get to do in more traditional jobs that constantly challenge us and require us to think deeply,” she says. “I’m looking to see what these workers’ career goals are, and how we can support them in learning new skills and in their careers, possibly through Causeway or something related to Causeway.” The possibilities for educational technology are nearly endless, and Rivera is looking forward to tackling as many as she can as a doctoral student and one day possibly as a professor. She says, “I would really like to continue doing research on educational technology and technology for social good.” As for that sophomore semester in Professor Dodds’ lab at HMC, she says, “I’m very glad I did research with him that summer, because it really propelled me forward. I liked thinking about different questions and trying to solve challenging problems. I liked writing up the work, getting the research out there, talking about it, hearing other people’s ideas, and being part of a bigger discussion.” She adds, “And now with my PhD, I’m continuing to do those things, while also thinking about how educational technology research can really affect people’s everyday lives and have a significant social impact.”

SUMMER 2019

MUDDERINGS

Outstanding Alumni Award recipients

Outstanding Recognition Annual awards given by the Harvey Mudd Alumni Association Board of Governors recognize impact on the College and service to society. At Alumni Weekend, six accomplished individuals were presented with a 2019 Outstanding Alumni Award: national reconnaissance pioneer Donald Simkins ’74/75 (engineering), physics research scientist John Armstrong ’69, microfabrication technology expert Roger T. Howe ’79 (physics), magnetic nanotechnology pioneer Eric Fullerton ’84 (physics), educator/advocate Jennifer Switkes ’94 (mathematics and physics), and entertainment technology innovator Mitch Hefter ’79 (engineering). All three Lifetime Recognition Award winners were 2009 Outstanding Alumni and members of the HMC Board of Trustees. Robert De Pietro ’69 (engineering) and Bruce Worster ’64 (physics) are past members of AABOG, and they join Rick Sontag ’64 (physics) in being longtime supporters of the College. The De Pietro family has endowed both the Frank de Pietro Memorial Scholarship and The Frank and Frances Fellowsip Program in Civil Engineering. With his wife, Susan, Worster

established the Susan and Bruce Worster ’64 Professorship in Physics and has supported several capital projects and scholarships, including the Class of ’64 Endowed Scholarship. Sontag and his wife, Susan POM ’64, funded the construction of the Frederick and Susan Sontag Residence Hall, the first building on the HMC campus named after an alumnus. They also funded the construction of Sontag Hall at Pomona College and recently established the Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity (The Hive), a resource for all The Claremont Colleges. Honorary Alumni, considered to have contributed significantly to the betterment of students and alumni, are Hal Barron, professor of history emeritus; Mike A. Erlinger, 2011 recipient of the Henry T. Mudd Prize, professor of computer science and former CS department chair; and Dan Macaluso, past vice president for the Office of College Advancement (2011–2018).

N ominations for the 2020 AABOG awards may be sent to alumni@hmc.edu.

Top: Honorary Alumni awardees Hal Barron, Mike Erlinger and Dan Macaluso. Lifetime Recognition awardees Bruce Worster ’64 with his wife, Susan, and Robert De Pietro ’69. Not pictured: Rick Sontag ’64.

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

Be Our Guest

History/arts enthusiasts toured the King Tut exhibit at the California Science Center in Los Angeles.

Alumni and friends helped make this one of the most active years yet; AABOG and HMC Advancement offered 34 events during 2018–2019. Once again, many of these were hosted by alumni who are interested in bringing together Mudders in their area. There were events for the nature-lover (Santa Cruz Island, Mt Baldy, Lake Tahoe, San Andreas Fault trip, Santa Cruz camping), arts enthusiast (King Tut exhibit/Los Angeles, “The Lightning Thief”/ Chicago play), techie (Tesla Gigafactory tour), adventurer (Andretti racing, Seattle Escape Room), foodie (Seattle Happy Hour, Hawaii brunch, London dinner, Atlanta brewery), career-minded (New York finance, Grace Hopper Houston, SIGCSE Minneapolis, Joint Mathematics Meetings Baltimore, HMC INQ) and more. Have an idea or want to volunteer to plan activities for alumni in your area? Contact the Events Committee of the Alumni Association Board of Governors (aabogevents-l@g.hmc.edu) or email the Office of Alumni and Parent Relations at alumni@hmc.edu.

Bikers Rejoice The response to the HMC custom bike apparel offered through Pactimo was tremendous! Alumni, parents, students, staff, faculty and friends bought 168 items: custom male and female jerseys, shorts, bibs, jacket and skull cap (unisex). Your purchases allowed the College to donate $4,385.25 to the Annual Mudd Fundd.

Many Thanks OBSA Seeking Alumni Mentors To increase alumni engagement and support students, the 7C Office of Black Student Affairs is seeking Black alumni for its Alumni-Student Mentoring Program. Participants agree to virtually mentor 7C students and can also help with recruitment and event hosting and by sharing their expertise as a speaker or panelist. Complete the OBSA interest form, bit.ly/OBSAMntrs19.

Thanks to the tremendous support of many loyal donors to Harvey Mudd College, Annual Mudd Fundd gifts during the 2018–2019 academic year totaled $4.1 million (just over the $4 million goal). These gifts provide invaluable resources that enable the College to continue pursuing its mission of educating academically well-rounded students who understand and appreciate the impact of their work on society. The College is grateful to all who joined this major effort.

SUMMER 2019

CLASS NOTES

A LUM N I P R O F IL E

Lessons in Leadership

The Wilburs mentor children and parents in a low-income, urban L.A. community. Written by Janie Fisher

DAVE WILBUR GRADUATED FROM HARVEY MUDD

College in 1968 with a bachelor’s degree in math. Following two master’s degrees, his first career was in environmental engineering, which led to engineering management positions and then aeronautical engineering management. As a manager with AeroVironment, a pioneering aeronautics company and leading manufacturer of unmanned aircraft systems, Dave and his team helped improve military intelligence, agriculture, energy systems and the electric vehicle industry. Today, he and his wife, Linda, are working on a very different kind of challenge: transforming the lives of families in underserved communities through their nonprofit, the LinDave Institute. It all began at East Los Angeles College (ELAC), where Linda taught early childhood development. She and her colleagues asked: Why were so few Latino women moving into leadership roles in academia? They were successfully earning their associate degrees but not moving beyond that. Was it something within the culture or within academia itself? In addition to economic hurdles, they found that much of the problem appeared to be self-image. The students simply couldn’t see themselves in leadership roles. “So we began a project,” says Linda, one that would build self-esteem and leadership skills. That’s when Dave, inspired by an economic management theorist, got involved. Dave had learned about W. Edwards Deming and his management theory from management studies he undertook while at AeroVironment, where he put Deming’s theory into practice as an engineering and project manager. The Deming philosophy incorporates systems thinking and encourages individual responsibility, teamwork and collaboration. Dave calls it “the scientific method and the Golden Rule applied to systems

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

management. As you learn to trust the team, you learn to trust yourself.” Dave and Linda wondered if the same techniques that motivated engineers in the workplace would work equally well for college students in child development. So, Linda started using these self-esteem-building principles in her ELAC intern leadership program. “I’d give them a project, I’d structure it, but I wouldn’t do it,” says Linda. This placed the responsibility—and the credit, once the goals were accomplished—entirely on the students, who were accustomed to doing as they were told. They were free to think for themselves and to rely on each other to reach their goals, skills they’d have to master to become leaders. As part of the project, Linda’s best child development students were invited to conduct leadership workshops at ELAC. From there, they added new projects in the community. “We began a project of reading one-on-one to small children,” says Linda. “Then we grew into working with young adults with autism.” In 2013, the Wilburs formalized their efforts as the LinDave Institute. Since then, they’ve been busy finding new ways to support underserved communities in East Los Angeles, like conducting a free camp for girls that builds self-esteem and sponsoring ongoing art and science workshops for children in Boyle Heights. They organize and prepare volunteers who read to preschoolers at ELAC’s Child Development Center, local Head Start programs and preschools, and who mentor young adults with cognitive delays. Volunteers and interns run free, bilingual parenting classes, tutor kids and train teachers, allowing Linda to continue to teach child development to the caregivers. Their project also facilitates art and science activities for Cloud 9, a community program for homeless families. The LinDave team also helps middle school students in East Los Angeles learn coding and graphics using the Scratch computer language. LinDave’s teachers learned Scratch from an online program led by Colleen Lewis, McGregor-Girand Associate Professor of Computer Science at HMC. If the Wilburs’ goal is to improve the self-image of the students and encourage them to give back, then the best measure of their success is the work that their interns have gone on to do. “Three have finished their master’s and two have received first-year assignments as adjunct professors in the community college. Another is working on her master’s in public advocacy, and several have moved

Dave and Linda Wilbur

on toward their B.A. after getting their A.A. from ELAC,” says Dave with pride. These students are from Boyle Heights and Highland Park where less than 15% graduate from high school and less than 5% complete college. Dave also notes that some of the program’s early participants are immigrants with DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) status and have entered careers that benefit their East Los Angeles community. “They’re moving into not just leadership roles, but educational leadership roles,” adds Linda. Now in their 70s, Dave and Linda have transitioned out of paid, full-time work, but are still active and engaged with their institute, “refocusing” as the Wilburs like to think of it. “I started out in math and computer science. I morphed into environmental engineering. I morphed again into managing engineers at an aerospace company, and now I’ve morphed into being education-oriented with this nonprofit,” says Dave. “After I morphed into child development, I realized that managing toddlers was not much different than managing engineers—both wanted something interesting to play with all day. I think Harvey Mudd prepared me for a variety of things. “I advise young people that there’s an excellent chance that you will not just change jobs but change fields,” he says. “The more well-rounded and capable you are, the happier you’ll be as you make those transitions.”

T o learn more about the LinDave Institute, visit lindave.org.

1964

1968 Patrick Rourke (engineering)

was called out of retirement to work on a problem for the Navy. He formed a company, put together a team and spent six years developing a general-purpose engineering software solution “that can synthesize full 3-D designs for fluid systems in minutes, starting from high-level requirements only.” He’s preparing to release the software as a commercial product.

James Bangsund (engineering) has had quite the

journey from engineering to Lutheran pastor to overseas seminary professor (Tanzania) back to Lutheran pastor and then to retirement. He has several books on Amazon.com to attest to this. He says, “Life is good, filled with part-time pastoring, family, travel, concerts, theater and a bit of baseball.”

1972

1966

part of the College’s Bates Aeronautics Program, led by Instructor of Aeronautics Emerita Iris Critchell. Full interview: http://bit.ly/Pinky41219

1974 Doug Burum (physics) is a patent agent at a patent

law firm in Nashua, New Hampshire, where he helps individual inventors and small- to mid-sized companies obtain patents for their inventions. He lives in the Boston area, and has three grown children, the eldest of whom recently got married. Doug conducted the marriage ceremony (“In Massachusetts, anyone can obtain a one-day license to conduct a marriage”). He sings baritone in a barbershop quartet.

Cloydine Beattie Thomas (mathematics) has retired

after years of owning a printing business and teaching computer graphics in adult education. She says, “We now live in Sun City Summerlin, a 55+ community 12 miles from the Las Vegas strip, where we enjoy the beautiful desert sky and rarely gamble. Still do graphics and computer work when requested by clubs or groups.”

1967 Gene Emery Ice (physics) is retired and enjoys riding a tandem bicycle with his wife of 40 years, Rosalyn. He published his first science fiction novel, Music World and the Prophets of Nebry. “It tells the tale of a slave scientist from the planet Nebry who discovers a world with unimaginable musical talent and resolves to contact this world and recruit a choir for the Great Trans Galactic Music Competition. The planet is Earth and the story takes on twists and turns as high school students from Earth are abducted and compete to save Earth and other musically gifted worlds.” George “Pinky” Nelson (physics) reflected on the 35th

Bob Kelley (physics) writes, “Just returned from lecturing in Cameroon to regulators responsible for weapons of mass destruction in the African Atlantic Façade of the European Union Chemical Biological Radiological and Nuclear Risk Mitigation Centres of Excellence Initiative.”

anniversary of his time in space with KAAL-TV/ ABC-6 News (Minnesota) in April. Pinky is a veteran of three space shuttle missions in the 1980s, including his first aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger from April 6–13, 1984, during which he used a jet-propulsion backpack while repairing a satellite used for solar observation. “That was a dream come true,” he said. “It’s what I’d been hoping to do my whole life. That was the highlight of my entire career. To be flying untethered like that was an amazing experience.” Pinky learned to fly while

George Conner (physics) writes: “Retired from electronics engineering at Teradyne last June after 40 years and am currently cruising on my sailboat in French Polynesia. Crossed the Pacific from Mexico. If you haven’t looked, there is a whole lot of water between Puerto Vallarta and the Marquesas. [In July], we [were] near Bora Bora. Will probably wind up in New Zealand eventually.” Frank Valdes (physics) has been an astronomer

for 37 years at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. He’s working on a major imaging survey of more than half the sky to find thousands of asteroids from near Earth to beyond Neptune. He also provides data and science software to astronomers around the world. His adopted grandson is starting high school.

SUMMER 2019

CLASS NOTES

1975

1984

Clare (Pitkin) Livak (engineering) is retired and

volunteers at Cedar Hill Girl Scout Museum and as a stage manager at Arlington Friends of the Drama. She also enjoys spending time with her grandsons, ages 8 and 4.

1978 Last year, Betty (Edwards) Johnson (physics) celebrated her 40th anniversary as a geophysicist with Chevron. She is leader of the Basin Framework Technology Team, which develops and deploys technologies to assist Chevron to explore basins for oil and gas throughout the world. In June, along with co-authors, she was awarded her first U.S. patent; they have a few more in development. A member of AABOG, she returns to HMC a few times a year. She also recently served on the Centennial Steering Committee for the American Geophysical Union.

1982 Tod Allman ’81/82

(engineering) attended Talbot seminary to learn how to become a Bible translator. With several colleagues, he founded All the Word Bible Translators, a group of computational linguists who worked for about 25 years to develop a software system that helps translate the Bible very quickly into various languages (“There are more than 7,000 languages in the world, but less than 1,000 of them have the complete Bible,” he says). In 2014, he moved with his family to the Philippines, where there are 175 indigenous languages, but less than 25 of them have the complete Bible. “My colleagues and I are hoping that eventually our software system will help translate complete Bibles very quickly for millions of people.” Kenneth Chinn (engineering) and his wife have three

kids—Abigail, Sam and Maggie (two high school + one middle school)—and he’s retired after 35 years with the Boeing Company.

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

Louis Kuo (chemistry) was

selected by the Oregon Academy of Science as the 2019 Scientist of the Year. A professor of chemistry at Lewis & Clark College since 1991, Louis has established research programs in the fields of organometallic chemistry and bioorganic chemistry. A Lewis & Clark news release notes that he was specifically selected in recognition of his considerable contributions to the field of environmental toxin remediation. His research focuses on the hydrolysis of organophosphates, which are key functional groups found in nature for use in genetic information storage, in industrial nerve agents, and in crop pesticides and herbicides. As one of his recommenders wrote, “The quality of Louis’s research is exceptionally high, which is all the more remarkable when you consider that it is done using only undergraduates … his work on organophosphate hydrolysis catalysis with metallocenes set the standard for the field.” His independent career has produced two patents and 20 papers featuring undergraduate co-authors. Louis is known as an outstanding mentor to undergraduates at Lewis & Clark both in the classroom and the research lab. “Usually this award is given to researchers at R1 institutions, so this was quite an honor and surprise for me,” he says. “Among the many great Lewis & Clark students (and one Mudder) who worked with me in the last 24 years, I also have Mudd to thank for setting the example of undergraduate research for me. I often mention the names and stories of my past Mudd professors to my students as it’s hard to forget them.”

1986 Bob Hood (physics), CEO of SpotLink a technology

solutions firm headquartered in San Diego, California, cycled across three countries to raise money for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. The ride across North America started in Tijuana on March 20. Averaging about 60 miles a day, Bob and his team spent 83 days on the road, riding 71 days to cover the 4,150 mile journey, ending in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Canada, on June 10. They raised $19,608 to “support about 400 hours of

research into finding a cure for breast cancer, which affects over 300,000 women each year in the U.S. and kills over 40,000,” says Bob. Find interviews and images at www.3CountryRide.org/Ride. Ellen Laderman (engineering) works in the areas of

privacy protection, and cyber resiliency (ensuring you can still do what you need to do despite being under cyber attack). Amanda Minieri (engineering) is a senior-level

software engineer by trade and has 24 years of experience in real-time embedded software engineering and development. In May, she received an M.S. in computer science from San Diego State University, where she focused on object-oriented programming and design principles and distributed systems. She’s been married for 12 years to Stephen Gabbert with whom she shares her love of travel on land and on sea via their 24-foot sailboat.

1987 Gina (Maiorana) Janke (engineering) was named

a Society of Women Engineers (SWE) Fellow for her engineering achievements, 30+ years involvement (which started at Harvey Mudd!) and encouragement of female engineer students through local scholarship programs. Stan Love (physics) is designing cockpit displays and

controls for NASA’s upcoming Orion spacecraft. “It’s not exactly physics, but it’s a very interesting combination of human perception, cognition and physical capabilities.”

1988 Jerry Brennock (mathematics) writes: “2019 is a big

transition year for my family as our oldest daughter is heading off to college. She is interested in both engineering and CS. The good news is she will have a great opportunity to explore both of those domains when she starts at HMC in August!” This year, Julia Goldstein (engineering) is publishing her first book Material Value: More Sustainable, Less Wasteful Manufacturing of Everything from Cell Phones to Cleaning Products and

completed her first Olympic distance triathlon. As an author she’s expanding her skills as a public speaker, and she’s a member of the Woodinville Concert Band, playing piccolo, and the associated Ah Tempo Flute Choir.

1993 Chuck Bean (physics) teaches physics at a public

1989

Las Vegas high school, coaches Science Bowl and National Academic Quiz Tournament teams to local championships, and is getting his son ready to enter HMC’s class of 2024.

Laurel Pollard (physics) writes: “Now that we are

Tom Hsieh (physics) is working on the revitalization

empty nesters, Doug (mathematics) and I have started a 3-D printing company: Pollard 3D Prints. We sell earrings and magnets at our local farmers market; Tagline: Made with math, code, and a 3-D printer.”

1991 Kenji Hashimoto (chemistry)

spoke at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management (his alma mater, 1997) in September 2018 about the future of the airline industry. This year, he was named Outstanding FP&A (financial planner and analyst) by Dallas CEO magazine: “As senior vice president of finance and corporate development, Kenji leads 500 financial team members at American Airlines … His creative innovations range from researching and incorporating best practices from other industries to bringing in guest speakers like Microsoft’s CFO to share insights.”

and across the country, while Rosey counsels at and provides support for a safe home for trafficked girls. Our baby, Sophia, is now 10 months old, and our foster daughter Chhaya just completed a hotel management course.”

of the city of Pomona, where he is chair of economic development through Pomona’s Promise. He helped orchestrate a political transformation in the city as volunteer campaign manager for the new mayor and helped three new councilmembers get elected. He has started several nonprofits and served on nonprofit and civic boards, including the CGU board of trustees. Tom founded SplinterRock Inc., a telecom consulting firm, and is working on a new startup, FLOATShuttle.com, a commuter airline.

For the past six years, Elizabeth Schoene (physics) has been teaching full-time at South Seattle College, a small community college. She writes, “I love it! I work with many amazing students in small introductory classes, which has allowed me to implement a wide variety of active learning strategies. Helping students experience the intrigue of physics and the power of teamwork and learn to persist through challenge is incredible. Though most students want to become engineers or computer scientists, I have helped some catch the physics bug and see the opportunities in physics and convinced them to switch majors!”

1994

2002

Michelle (Young) Mann ’93/94 (engineering) retired

After grad school, Austin Brown (physics) worked in energy, transportation and climate tech and policy. He moved to D.C. to work at the Department of Energy and, for 2015–2017, in the Obama White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In 2017, he moved back to California and is now at the University of California, Davis, where he directs the Policy Institute for Energy, Environment, and the Economy, helping connect research to public policy. He says, “My primary work aim is to help fight climate change in a way that also makes access to energy and transportation services more equitable.”

early from engineering and is managing rental properties and taking care of teenaged daughters, one of whom has shown an interest in HMC. Josh Mann (engineering) is a manager at Hewlett-Packard overseeing a team of engineers developing printing technology for commercial printing applications. Both Josh and Michelle are pursuing winemaking and considering opening a winery in the Ramona area of San Diego County.

1992

1995

Ruth Fink-Winter (engineering) says she is still doing

Jose Mota (engineering) moved with his family

Jennifer “Mili” Lindsay (mathematics) is thrilled

to The Netherlands last year to start a new role as upstream GM for safety leadership at Shell Oil Company. He says, “It has been a fascinating experience working on the behavioral and cultural elements of many Shell ventures across the globe to support them in delivering their operations safety.” He adds that he and his wife, Norma, and two kids, Natalia (12) and Sebastian (9) now bike everywhere.

Amanda Malone (engineering) is the chief scientific

Rocky Horror. This August she’ll combine a German course in Cologne with Rocky Horror performances in Berlin and Paris. She’s also taking dance classes and recently started aerial hoop in the belief that anything worth doing well is also worth doing poorly. Jack In-Jay Houng (physics) writes that he is happily

married with two children. He teaches English to Chinese using “Chinese phonetics and nursery rhymes as foundations to listening and speaking and deferring the typical second-language method of phonics, grammar and vocabulary, which are more for reading and writing.” He also teaches astronomy and nature photography at a rural high school in central Taiwan. Jack also writes opinion pieces for magazines to help foster STEM literacy in Taiwan.

2001 Jonathan Hakim (physics) writes: “My wife Rose

Hakim ’04 (engineering) and I live in a slum in India. I manage literacy programs for unschooled adult and children in our slum, the broader city

to be making her Metropolitan Opera debut as a member of the chorus for Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Performances run September–October and January–February, and the final performance on Feb. 1 will be broadcast live as part of the Met Live in HD series.

officer of a biotech company in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. “We are developing sustained release drug delivery platforms for the treatment of various indications including osteoarthritis and surgical site infections. We have shown proof of concept of our lead asset, an intra-articular injection for the treatment of arthritis pain in people and are gearing up for a larger dose-ranging efficacy study

SUMMER 2019

CLASS NOTES

[by] scaling and optimizing our manufacturing processes to ensure we have a well-controlled test product.” Amanda is in charge of managing all aspects of the company’s scientific development, including early formulation, pre-clinical testing, manufacturing and clinical testing.

2008

2013 Katarina Hoeger (mathematics) joined the intermedia

MFA program at the University of Maine at Orono, where she’ll create projects mixing mathematics, computer science, music and sound, resulting in sound art and other unique sound experiences. She spent several years teaching kids coding and other STEAM-related activities at the Digital Arts Experience in Scarsdale, New York, while running the not-for-profit Music Community Lab.

2003 Matt Macauley (mathematics) and his wife became

new parents in November 2018 (daughter, Ida). He is an associate professor at Clemson University in South Carolina, and the book he co-edited with a colleague, Algebraic and Combinatorial Computational Biology, was published. During the last few years, he’s taught internationally, in South Africa, Taiwan and Suriname.

2004 David Gaebler (mathematics) was granted tenure and

promoted to associate professor of mathematics at Hillsdale College.

2006 Marguerite Leeds (mathematics) has returned from

her Peace Corps service in Kyrgyzstan as a health educator and is back in school full-time for a master’s in nursing.

2007 Amy Jarvis (engineering) earned an MBA with

distinction from Cornell Tech. She is working as a product manager for Zillow on the Zillow Offers, Machine Learning team in Seattle.

2014 Anthony Corso (physics) is a PhD candidate in Diana Hawkins (engineering) recently submitted

her master’s thesis in wine science through the University of Auckland, New Zealand. “I’m off to do a wine harvest in California later this year before returning Down Under where I hope to continue my career in the wine industry.” Parousia Rockstroh (mathematics) recently returned

to Santa Monica, California, after living and working in Puerto Rico with FEMA for the past year. He says, “Following Hurricane Maria, FEMA has been working to repair and replace infrastructure on the island. I have been working as a member of the Independent Expert Panel to review and validate the work that FEMA has been doing. This is one of my roles as a researcher at the RAND Corporation. I have been working primarily in the energy sector where I have been leading a team to model the power grid in Puerto Rico.”

2011 Sarah Loeb (mathematics)

Badier Velji (engineering) was promoted to technical project manager at Roche Sequencing Solutions in Santa Clara, California, and will complete his MBA from Berkeley in December. His marriage to Kaila Prins on July 20 was attended by many Mudders.

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

and Ben Gano were married in Portland, Oregon, July 5. In 2017, Sarah graduated from the University of Illinois with a PhD in mathematics. She is an assistant professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. Ben (B.A. astronomy, University of Illinois) is a chemist at KDC Laboratory. Hong Sio (physics) completed a PhD in physics at

Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018 and is a postdoctoral experimental physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

the Aeronautics and Astronautics department at Stanford University. He is a member of the Center for AI Safety, where he works on techniques for verification and validation of safety-critical autonomous systems, including autonomous vehicles and aircraft collision avoidance systems. It’s been an eventful year for Natasha Parikh (math/ comp/bio). She completed a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at Duke University, was awarded the 2019 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and began a teaching postdoc at Harvard University this fall. Brett Mills (physics) spent

three years as a data scientist at Microsoft and recently finished the first of two years of an MBA at MIT Sloan School of Management. He’s excited about taking innovations, building products around them and bringing them to market. This summer, he’s a product management intern at the 5G communication hardware startup Pivotal Commware, where he combines his background in physics and business “to help evaluate the market for and shape a product that will revolutionize how carriers deploy 5G across the country and the world.” Emily M. Ross (engineering),

a first-year law student at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, was one of four law students selected to receive the 2019

Donald W. Banner Diversity Fellowship. Created by the firm to strengthen diversity and inclusion in the field of intellectual property law, the fellowship provides recipients with $5,000 for law school tuition or other school-related expenses. As a fellowship recipient, Emily participated in the firm’s summer associate program based in Banner Witcoff’s Chicago office.

2015 Paul Jerger(physics) is a graduate student at the

University of Chicago, studying in the group of Prof. David Awschalom. In his research, Paul uses light-emitting atomic defects in diamond (nitrogen-vacancy centers) to study fundamental quantum state operations and perform quantum measurements on atomically-thin semiconductors. Emily (Beese) Jerger ’17 (physics) is a project

manager at the nonprofit MxD, The Digital Manufacturing Institute, where she leads collaborative research endeavors at the intersection of industry and academia. MxD aims to improve the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing through the use of digital technologies. Her recent project members have included Dow, Raytheon, Microsoft and Coca-Cola. Paul and Emily recently celebrated their one-year wedding anniversary. Sophia Williams (engineering)

is a graduate student at Stanford University in electrical engineering. She’s doing research on haptics and robotics in CHARM Lab under Professor Allison Okamura.

2016 Last year, Allie Barry (engineering) graduated with an MBA from Penn State University. As a global supply manager for Lucid Motors she works with engineers to strategically source global suppliers for their Motorsport battery packs and the chassis of Lucid’s cutting-edge electric sedans. “Through this start-up experience, I have been able to combine my engineering and business backgrounds to push the limits of technology.”

2017 After graduating, Maya Martirossyan (physics) took a gap year and did REU/ internship programs at the National Institute of Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, and worked as a teaching assistant at the American University of Armenia in Yerevan, Armenia. She is completing her first year as a PhD student in materials science at Cornell. Since passing qualifying exams in May, she has been doing research with Professor Julia Dshemuchadse. This past spring, she was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to study growth of complex crystal structures via molecular dynamics simulations. She’s learning how to ice skate and adopted a cute cat named Emmy (after Emmy Noether).

2018 Viviana Bermudez (engineering) does management

consulting in Los Angeles. She manages projects for entertainment, social media and healthcare clients. “Next, I hope to move to NYC to continue working with organizations that create a positive social impact.” Annalise Schweickart (math/

comp/bio) is studying for a PhD at Cornell University’s medical school in New York City. Through her research, which pertains to the statistical analysis of biological networks, she is looking for pathways or processes that differentiate disease patients from healthy patients, focusing specifically on diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease.

Your News Matters Have you changed jobs? Retired? Celebrated a milestone? We want your news! We compile information from a variety of public sources: campus event notices, newspaper and magazine articles, press releases and Google alerts. Please submit updates to alumni@hmc.edu.

Solution explanation to Kurashige’s puzzle, page 17 1. Spell out the numbers in the left column (e.g., for the first row, 400 as "four hundred"). 2. I dentify the words and the pictures in the right two columns (e.g., for the first row, "UFO" on the left and "URANIUM" on the right). 3. When you place the two pictures in the same column together (e.g., for the first row, "UFOURANIUM"), you will notice that the spelling of a number appears (e.g., for the first row "UFOURANIUM" has "FOUR"). 4. Index into the spelled-out number in the left column with this value, (e.g., for the first row, take the fourth letter from "four hundred," which is R). 5. Each row corresponds to a letter, and reading them top-to-bottom gives the answer, "RIGHT."

SUMMER 2019

REUNION CLASS PHOTOS

Class of 1964

Class of 1969

Dennis Diestler, Robert Borton, Bruce Worster, Ron Rimerman, Al Waltz, Russ Merris

(Front) John Armstrong, John Barsky, Tom Bleakney, Henry Brady, Howard Cohen, Robert De Pietro, Libby Medley, Glenn Fisher, Walt Foley. Leslie Foster (Middle) Celso Frazao, Paul Glassco, John Harrell, Jon Hart, Bob Hu, Scott Hutchason, Bill Jensen, Julie DeFord (Back) Andy Kaye, Gurucharan Khalsa, Lloyd Regier, Phil Reid, Ron Roth, Michael Teel, Tex Tiller, Tom Valk, Greg Wease, Connie Weeks, George Zimmerman

Class of 1974

lass of 1979 C

(Front) Bev Orth, Marty Rudat, Martin Caniff, John Ogren, Rich Zucker, Ken Livak, Brian Wong, Marty White, Richard Maurer (Middle) Dave Farber, Dewey Szemenyei, Bill Oakes, Ron Blanc, Alan Okagaki, Fred Pickel, Steve Hogan, Denny Bollay, Rick Levin (Back) Don Simkins, Frank Valdes, Scott Olmsted, Tony Noe, Bruce DePriester, Tim O’Donnell, Tedd Gibson, Mark Mrohs

(Front) Mitch Hefter, Marc Murbach, Roland Grable, Dave Berger, Wayne Helander, Jon Foletta, Wayne Praskins (Back) Larry Lerner, Sergio Perez Santillan, Roger Howe, Jon Gayek, Joe Shanks, Jim Wall ’80, Jim Marsters

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

Class of 1984 (Front) Karl Flueckiger, Carolyn Wetzel, Laurie Ray, Jean Tsao, Laura Michelsen, Shelly Gragg, Lisa Duncan, Jay Kim (Back) Eric Fullerton, Larry Roll, Doug Ray, Steve Ray, David Gardner, Brian Gragg, Jim Smith, Eric Johnson

Class of 1989 (Front) Angie Moore, Kaia David, Bob Nigh, Sandy Price, Tim Wendler, Carl Webb, Kimberly Lawler-Sagarin, Rani Biswas, Jung Park, Karl Chan, Mary Johnson (Back) Brian Butler, James Marca, John McNeil, Mark Johnson, Kyle Hayes, Dave Styerwalt, Roger Carlson, Doug Gilman, Scott Ellsworth, Lesli Johnson, Howard Deshong III

SUMMER 2019

Class of 1994 (Front) Matthew Hyon, John Stimson, Omak Frazier, Hanna Ma, Christie Yoo, Heather Olson, Mike Olson, Phil Snyder, Ben Melhuish (Middle) Gavin Minami, Pete Russo, Jenny Switkes, Mike Munson, Gunner Dandurand, Erik Browne, Ski Korsunsky, Dan Hyman, Michael Hicks (Back) Milo Crisostomo, Cliff McCarthy, Mark Huber, Josh Mann, Smitty Hamilton, Greg Harr, Mark Mathison

Class of 1999

(Front) Rene Gamero, James Holloway, Dan Anderson, Jim Tran, Ben Teller, Carolyn (Meyers) Dharmâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;00, Jenn Bernat, Abi Kritzer, Treasa Sweek, Stacy Sanders (Middle) Wayne Yang, Tom Vaughan, Andre Abramenko, Aaron Barber, Kevin Eustice, Itai Seggev, David Chan, Bill Kalahurka, Jamey Minnis, Carrie Crum Lindstorm, Jennifer Jack, James Fox (Back) Jason Umhoefer, Jeff Mattlin, Christian Andreu-Von Euw, Steve Foley, Frank Shaw, John Fuhrman, Alex Johnson, Ryan Thomas, Drew Bernat, Max Robinson

lass of 2004 C (Front) Brandt Erickson, Lindsay (Crowl) Erickson, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Renee Logan, Elizabeth Lee-Su, Lai Lao, Jenny Xu (Middle) Kevin Pang, Melissa Banister, Edward Heaney, Michael Vrable, Diana Friedman, Brian Humphrey, Esther Lee, Alexis Utvich-De Larme (Back) Andres Del Campo, Adrian Mettler, Ian Ferrel, Jeffrey Scherpelz, Aaron Uber Jacobs, Allison Jacobs

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

Class of 2009 (Front) Glennis Rayermann, Leslie Mallinger, Trevin Murakami, Tahir Yusufaly, Marty Field, Michael Braly, Janet Komatsu, Ginna Kim, Liz Corpuz, Terence Wong, Rachel Nishimura, Nadia Abuelezam, Annika Eberle, Alicyn Henkhaus, Claire O’Hanlon, Eric Doi, Aaron Abromowitz (Middle - row 2) Heather Justice, Jack “J.J.” Boyles ’11, Sarah Fletcher, Devin Smith, Kyle Marsh, Liz Flannery, Aurora Pribram-Jones, Shannon McKenna, Catherine Bradshaw, Rachel Cranfill, Kerri Thomas, Gregory Herschler, Hector Cuevas, Vatche Attarian, Patrick Foley, Edwin Lei, Huai-Jin Loh (Middle - row 3) Christopher Fox, Helen Fitzmaurice, Judy Hines, Brad Witkowski, Ben Fogelson, Robert Eckert, Akash Rakholia, Scott Smith, Lauryn Baranowski, Rebecca Burns, Michael Van Antwerp, Rishad Manekia, Ace Ellett, Hayden Gomes, Lolly Mitchell, Andrew Mitchell, David Su, Eric Young (Back) John Allen, Stephen Rosenthal, Richard Mehlinger, Steven Huntzicker, Sam Gordon, Andrew Wong, Adrian Sampson, Ben Jencks, Brett McLarnon, Christina Snyder, Jonathan Litz, Joshua Cobb, Stephon Striplin, Greg Farnum, Ryan Quarfoth, Oliver Johnson

Class of 2014 (Front) Morgan Luckey, Maya Johnson, Stephen Pinto, Katie Shepherd, Carling Sugarman, Tessa Adair, Joel Ornstein, Meghan Jimenez, Sarah Lichtman, Sejal Shah, Allison Arnold-Roksandich, Tuan Nguyen, Estella Lai, Sasha Paudel, Julia Lee, Rohaine Hsu, Olivia Warren (Middle - row 2) Cecily Hunt, Natasha Parikh, Margaret O’Keefe, Fangzhao An, Madeline Goldkamp, Vyas Savanur, Rohi Bagaria, Abigail Gregory, Sidra Hussain, Lauren Nishizaki, Angela Medina, Diana Mar, Michelle Vick, Victoria Feudo, Xinrui Zhang (Middle - row 3) James Best, Mark Mann, Lena Reed, Clara Amorosi, Sophie Saouma SCR’14, Ravi Kumar, Phillian Haynes, Stephanie Fawaz, Douglas Hu, Sorathan Chaturapruek, Audrey Musselman-Brown, Jean-Claude de Sugny, Sophie Parks, Emma Bodell, Jason Wang, Lisa Gai, Jack Ma, Anastasia Patterson, Jordan Zesch (Middle - row 4) Alistair Dobke, Joshua Vasquez, Bryan Monroy, Brianna Thielen, Spencer Harris, Gregory Kronmiller, Brian (Fielder) Frost, David Derry, Rebecca Thomas, David Lingenbrink, Patrick Meehan, Christian Mason, Jacob Bandes-Storch, Kate Spiesman, Sheena Patel (Back) Obosa Obazuaye, Alberto Ruiz, Samuel Yim, Sean Velazquez, Ray Hurwitz, Frank Liu, Anthony Chung, Jacob Low, Jeremy Usatine, Andrew Turner, Jeb Brooks

SUMMER 2019

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

Children and staff member Erica Almodovar do a music and movement activity as part of the LinDave Instituteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s child development program. Dave â&#x20AC;&#x2122;68 and Linda Wilbur started the nonprofit to share their expertise in leadership and education and to help support HARVEY MUDD inCOLLEGE underserved communities East Los Angeles. See story on page 36.

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Harvey Mudd College Magazine, summer 2019

Articles inside

Follow the Leaders

Lessons in Leadership

New Tech Assists Learning

Look, No Hands

(Re)Searching for an Answer

Industry Solutions

Presentation Days Amaze

Summer Studies

A Bumpy Road Paves the Way

Thought Leader

VP for Advancement: Hieu Nguyen