Class Notes Archives
July/August 2009 |
January/February 1999 Hi Everyone! Starting in the Boston area, congratulations go out to Dan Housman and Ron Schmelzer '97. They received $1 million in venture financing from Blue Rock Capital and Softbank Ventures for their reseller extranet software company, VirtuFlex Software Corp. in Cambridge. The company will be changing names to Channelwave Inc. and they are frantically looking to hire more programmers. Jeremy Isikoff has his name on the patent that he and Dan received for laptop security. Find the details here. Scott A. Rhodes is now working at VTECH in Acton, MA. Annie Fortunato is in her second-year as a biological oceanographer in the MIT/WHOI joint program. Both were in San Francisco in May for the wedding of Mike Foster and Liz Pao. On October 31, Scott and Annie will be married in Long Island. Loretta (Vidos) Pioch is working for Invention Machine in Boston. Maria Palacios is putting the final touches on her thesis for her Masters of Regional Planning at Cornell University. She is now in Cambridge, looking to work in the field of low-income housing. She spent last summer in the Dominican Republic doing field research in rural housing, and still hopes to travel the world. David Frohman was a strategic consultant at Braxton Associates, then started working for the Thomson Corporation in Boston where he helped them handle their strategy for dealing with the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and supported their Year 2000 Program Office. In September David returned to Sloan to get an MBA at Sloan to combine business and psychology while studying organizational behavior. Andrew Kim is currently the President of Edgerton House and is working on his PhD in Course 3. In December, Josh Abrams will be finishing his Masters in Theatre from Brown University. A PhD program may or may not be in his future. After spending the summer in Kentucky, working in the literary department at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Josh is teaching and directing at Bristol Community College in Fall River. Kimberly Mazzocco, now in her second year at Columbia Law School, spent the summer as an intern at the International Justice Mission, a small human rights organization in DC. When her project group went to Haiti to present their findings to the Organization of American States/United Nations mission and to the US Embassy, she learned that the current US Ambassador there is Timothy Carney, a fellow MIT alum! Kyle Shinseki just completed his move from Phoenix to DC. He is still working for the National Council of La Raza, but now as a Senior Resource Development Specialist. Ben Jordan is happy in Atlanta, but wishes more of his buddies from MIT would take the time to visit! He reports that Javier Nazario, who is in the MS/PhD program at the University of Maryland, is finding plenty of time to party in the Baltimore/DC area. Javi spent a couple of weeks in Europe over the summer where he planned to attend World Cup matches in France, but Ben thinks he mostly partied and watched the matches on television. When Jay Moore visited Ben in the spring they tried to get fellow Log Will Lee to join them, but Will was too busy working long hours with a start-up in Cambridge. Rohit Gupta is now applying for a residency in ER. Shalini Verma is still on the launch team of the 1999/2000 Lincoln/Jaguar engine. She is also now one of the North American co-chairs for The Network of Indian Professionals (NetIP-NA) and is looking into MBA programs. Fred Hernandez got engaged to Jennifer Hendricks over Labour Day Weekend. No date set for the wedding yet, but they are aiming for the last weekend in April 1999. Joe Chang is in his last year at UT-Southwestern Medical School. He plans to be in Ob-Gyn. Joe recorded a CD in Taiwan a few summers ago. He didn't want the songs released then because of commitments to medical school, but he had fun anyway and said it was nice to get paid for it! Lizette Arce and Prashant Doshi returned to the US in November 1997 after 16 months working and enjoying themselves in The Netherlands. They visited the second largest underground cave system in the world in Slovenia and attended a traditional wedding with fresh pints of Guinness in Dublin, Ireland. They were engaged on February 23, 1998, on the warm, beautiful shores of Guanica, Puerto Rico while watching the sun dip behind the mountains. They will be married on October 11, 1998, with the reception being held on South Padre Island, Texas. Brian Carlstrom and Jennifer (Tschudy) Carlstrom are about to celebrate one year in their new house by spending time with the newest member of their family - a black Labrador named Clyde. Brian is at Ariba Technologies and Jennifer just reached her one-year anniversary with Space Camp. Yeh-Jiun Tung, who is working on his Ph.D. in EECS at UC Berkeley, spent the summer at Lawrence Livermore National Lab helping to develop the technology to make flat-panel displays on flexible plastic. Over Labour Day weekend he had a small get together in Hermosa Beach, LA at Arturo Rosales' '96 pad with other MIT Phi Delt alums. Pledge brother Tyler Shubert was also there. David Oh '91 and Bryn (Mowry) Oh are expecting their first child in January! Bryn says she feels big already, and can't imagine being 9 months. She's currently working at a startup called TopTier Software in San Jose. They're hiring madly, so anyone in the Bay Area looking for a job should check out www.toptiersw.com. Ben Serridge was working in Mexico at the Universidad de las Americas and has recently been hired to the Mexico subsidiary of Applied Language Technologies, a Boston-based speech-recognition company where Jose Elizondo also works. Minh Le recently took some time off from Vitesse Semiconducter in Colorado to vacation in Maui with Scott MacGregor '96. He said the scuba diving was great! Trey Ideker, who is continuing to work on his PhD in Biotechnology at the University of Washington in Seattle, just got engaged to Kristyn Gray. They're planning for a June wedding in LA. Chris Siren received his MS in Physics from the University of New Hampshire in May. He was an astronomy teaching assistant and is currently running open nights at the UNH observatory. He is now working towards a PhD in the physics program with the eventual goal of teaching physics and astronomy. His research involves simulating the SEPICA instrument on the ACE spacecraft. SEPICA is designed to examine the species of ions coming off of the sun. More detail can be found here. His Myths and Legends page, which he began while at MIT, has received about half a million hits! This summer Chris successfully hiked to the top of Mount Washington from Pinkham Notch with some friends. Chee-Kiang Lim recently met Wynne Kwan who is working in Singapore. Cheeky loves to meet with fellow MIT alums, so if you happen to be in Singapore, drop an email in advance and you'll be taken to the best food around!
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