MIT Class of 1963 Class Notes
Sept 2002
MIT Class of 1963, Class
Notes for September 2002 issue of Technology Review
We begin this column with information from Class President *Larry
Krakauer that will help you plan for our upcoming reunion. Larry writes: "Please help us plan the 40th reunion of the
Class of '63! As class president, I've
been granted a small corner of our Class Notes between now and the
reunion. The reunion will be the first
weekend in June 2003, from Friday June 6 through Sunday June 8. Hold that weekend. Please send any ideas of any sort about the reunion to me at
"
". Be sure we have updated your contact
information, so we can keep you informed of events as the date approaches. If you'd like to work with the Reunion
Events Committee, let me know that as well.
Even if you are not in the Boston area, we can keep in touch by
telephone and e-mail, and there are ways you can help out. As we get closer to the event, and our plans
start to gel, we'll begin using our class web page at "http://alumweb.mit.edu/classes/1963/"
to keep you informed. The schedule this
year is a bit different than it has been in the past. The major dinner is Friday evening. At that dinner, as the fortieth reunion class, we will host MIT
President and Mrs. Charles Vest. Tech
Night at the Pops will be Saturday evening." Let's have a big turnout for this reunion. The best way to do that is to make sure that
your friends from our undergraduate days will be there to enjoy the gathering
with you. Call or E-mail them, and plan
to attend together.
Now back to the more typical and mundane class notes information about our classmates' awards, business triumphs, promotions, retirements, entry in the world of grandparenthood, trips, etc. In the Fall of 2001 *Stuart Kurtz, a member of the technical staff at Dow Chemical Co., in Bound Brook, NJ was elected as a fellow of the Society of Plastics Engineers. Only 183 of the current 29,000 SPE members have been so honored. Congratulations! Stuart was cited for his outstanding long-term contributions to plastics engineering. He has invented several polyethylene products and other plastics and he was the first to understand the causes of various fractures in plastics extrusion. Among other contributions he provided a theoretical understanding of the dynamics of blown film manufacturing. In addition to his MIT degree in chemical engineering, Stuart holds an MSE in polymer materials, an MA in engineering and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering all from Princeton. He holds 16 patents.
I checked out the web page for *Ray Soifer's
consulting company. (The WWW offers a
class secretary numerous opportunities to check up on his classmates, find out
what they are doing, and generate information for this space. Let me know if you'd like some information
about your company to appear here.)
After 25 plus years working on Wall Street, Ray established Soifer
Consulting, LLC in March 2000. During
his career Ray headed corporate strategy at Bankers Trust, and was a senior VP
at Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. In
the early 70's he served in Washington in the office of the Assistant Secretary
of Commerce for Maritime Affairs. He's
been ranked by the Wall Street Journal as the number one bank analyst for stock
picking, and by EuroMoney as one of its stars among stock analysts. At Soifer Consulting, Ray works on strategy
for companies in the global financial services area. This includes mergers and acquisitions advisory services, risk management, financial disclosure to
analysts and investors, management training, studies of how key aspects of a client's
strategy and competitive position are viewed by the investment community, research
on thought leadership and public
policy topics of interest to the financial services industry, and more. After MIT Ray received an MBA from the
Harvard Business School where he was a George F. Baker Scholar.
*Mike Bertin and his wife
Barbara spent 3 weeks in Northern Italy and Provence, France this past
spring. (As class secretary, I find
that Mike Bertin is often a good source of news to flesh out this column. Thanks Mike.) They ate and drank their way from Bologna and Florence to Lucca,
Pisa, Portovenere, Gordes, and Arles.
In addition to seeing some of the famous art in Florence, they went to
the Museum of the History of Science around the corner from the Uffizi
gallery. Mike is an amateur astronomer,
and this museum has one of the four surviving telescopes that Galileo
used. The scope is a refractor, in a
leather tube about a meter long, with a 25mm diameter objective lens and a
magnification of about 20x, quite crude by today's standards. Just think what Galileo might have
discovered with one of today's commercially available amateur telescopes. They also have one of Galileo's fingers on
display. No kidding. This museum is definitely worth a stop if
you are in Florence. It's a nice break
from all the art museums, is much less crowded, has self guiding tours in
English, and many interesting things to see.
On the way back from France to Italy Barbara and Mike stopped briefly at
Monte Carlo to perform some statistical studies. But that's another story …
It was Mother's Day, and they dined in a lovely outdoor café beside the
casino. At the next table a VERY famous
and recognizable American basketball player was having lunch with his
mother. His team was not in the
playoffs this year. Mike says we could
have used him on our freshman team, but I think he wasn't born at the time, and
I don't think he's interested in engineering or science.
This column will be appearing on
the Web in June, and in print in Tech Review in September. For those of you that see it on the Web have
a good summer, and send me an E-mail to let me know what you're up to (you can
probably tell that the information in this short and padded column comes mainly
from press releases, rather than personal releases), and, for those of you who
see it in print I hope you had a good summer, and send me an E-mail to let me
know what YOU are up to. Regards to
all.
So classmates, keep those cards and letters comin' in. E-mails, telephone calls, and notes on alumni fund envelope flaps too. You can reach me at: Mike Bertin, 22 Gillman St, Irvine, CA 92612. E-mail: mailto:MCB1@aol.com. If you want to schmooze, call me at (949) 786-9450.
Menu
Site Map | Advanced Search
http://alumweb.mit.edu/classes/1963/ notes.shtml
There have been [an error occurred while processing this directive] visits to this web page since [an error occurred while processing this directive].