Class Notes Archives
July/August 2009 |
January/February 2000 Hello Everyone! Well, lots of life changes in this report. If you're moving, please be sure to update your alumni records. Send me e-mail if you need instructions. Also, please check our website for missing classmates and reunion info. Now, on with the notes! After working in software consulting for 4 years at Sapient Corporation, Ron Phelan has now gone back to school. He started his MBA at Cornell's Johnson School of Management, which so far is a blast. Dan Brown is designing algorithms for genomics problems at Cornell. He recently passed his master's exam and should be finishing up in a year or so. "Thence to postdoc land and hopefully getting a real job before too too long." He and his partner, Daniel, live in downtown Ithaca, in a hundred-year-old building on a pedestrian mall. Fouad Saad completed his first year at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in the spring and spent the summer working in Cincinnati, Ohio in the international investments division of Cinergy, a utility turned upstart energy company. While in Ohio, he happened upon some Proctor and Gamble folks: Jahnavi Swamy, Cathy Conley '96, Brian and Clara Dye, and Lara Ivey '96, plus his ZBT brother, Jeremy Henry '93. He also saw Nancy Ho, Ritesh Shah '97 and Dow Chi '97 while in New York for a weekend. After spending some time at home in Beirut, he will be returning to the Kennedy School in September for his second and final year there, and his ninth year straight in Boston. After finishing his MEng, Peter Orondo spent a brief time as an IT consultant. In Sept 1998, he went back to MIT for a PhD. He is now working on modelling of Electromagnetic Scattering processes. Mei-Ling Pan and Chee-Kiang Lim got married in Boston in June. They had a wedding lunch in Lexington that was attended by many MIT classmates, including Yueh Lee, Susan Hsieh, Celia Huey '96, Richard Hamlin, Irene Yeh '98, Kuoyi Lim '94, Desmond Lim '94, and Howard Pan. The following day, they left for a honeymoon cruise in Bermuda on board the Norwegian Majesty. They had such a great time that they would advise anyone looking for honeymoon ideas to seriously consider a cruise. Mei and Chee-Kiang have since moved to Singapore where they will be staying for a couple of years. Chee-Kiang has also moved to a new job at the Ministry of Defence, Singapore. They would like to invite old friends to get in touch via email (cheeky@mit.edu) and visit. Tony Sebro graduated from the University of Michigan with a JD/MBA in June. He's moving to NYC in the fall to work for Kenyon & Kenyon, an intellectual property law firm. Andrew Kraft and his wife, Jennifer, are currently expecting a sibling for their daughter, Emilia Florence. They don't know if this one will be a boy or a girl yet, but the ultrasounds show 4 limbs and a head, so they have hopes that, even with Andrew's genes, the baby is at least human. Andrew is still chugging away at AIP in New York City. The company is holding an event in October where they will be having either Al Gore or the Chairman of the FCC speak to top Internet industry execs. He's doing more lobbying now (not fun) but a lot more talking with top execs (fun). Vijay Sankaran finished consulting with James Martin & Co. in June after he found out that he was accepted to the Duke (Fuqua) School of Business. During the summer he vegged out and enjoyed all the relaxation that he had missed over the past couple of years. In August, he met up with MITers Bill Arnold '94 and Sheetal Shah '96 for a European vacation. They went to Amsterdam, Prague, Budapest, Vienna, Salzburg and Munich. They met up with Evelyn Kao, who is currently working with JP Morgan, London, in Budapest. There were many high points to the trip, but the total solar eclipse in Salzburg was definitely very amazing. Now Vijay's back into the academic life at Fuqua where he needs to study again! Lizette Arce and Prashant Doshi are leaving Rhode Island and heading to South Carolina for a short term assignment with AMS. They had a blast at the recent wedding of Phil Nadeau and Dawn Wells in Boston. Phil is on his way to solving the world's biggest problems at Harvard while Dawn is leading an exciting career at Fast Company. A number of Delts were present for the weekend festivities. The groomsmen included Brian Starzec, Mark Hartge, and the best man, Jason Mueller, who flew in from Hong Kong for the event. Best wishes to Phil & Dawn as they begin their married life together! Ben Jordan's job has put him on the road a lot this year. In 1999, he made more than 20 trips to places like Jamaica, Costa Rica, Chile, Puerto Rico -- and Connecticut. He is now focusing on environmental issues in Latin America for Coca-Cola. Although most of his travels have been through business trips, he has taken a little time here and there to do plenty of sightseeing and soaking up the local culture. He is still in Atlanta -- if anyone makes their way here, they should look him up. John Jacobs is working for The Travel Company in Delray Beach, FL, and living in Davie, where the weather is good and the beach is crowded. His company has several travel sites, but no employee discounts. Also, like everyone else, they can't find enough people with VB & ASP skills. Jun Nip '94 was in their shop as a Price Waterhouse consultant, but she rolled off the project. Their newest site is www.flycheap.com. After MIT, Yara I. Alma-Bonilla worked for a year at the Commission for Women's Affairs in San Juan, P.R. She then went to Washington D.C. on a fellowship from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute that funded her training to report on national Latino issues for the D.C.-based "Hispanic Link Weekly Report". Next, she worked for the National Association for Bilingual Education, for MANA-A National Latina Organization and for the Center for the Advancement of Hispanics in Science and Engineering Education (CAHSEE). At the beginning of this year, she went to Georgetown University to learn more. Now? "I'm ready to go home and have some real fun." She'll be starting a Masters in Literature at the University of Puerto Rico in the fall of 2000. Maribel L. Delfaus recently returned from her honeymoon with Enrique Iglesias. As a "wedding gift" her boss gave her a promotion to Department Manager in Logistics at Procter & Gamble, San Juan, Puerto Rico. Ironic that after spending six years to obtain a masters in Nuclear Engineering, Maribel ended up working distributing toilet paper and paper towels! Maribel's next life project is planning for a baby to come soon and building the house of her dreams at the top of a mountain. Meanwhile, she will keep toiling away in the corporate world until the time comes when she can leave and become a science teacher in a junior high school. In June, Zachira Castro and David Dettmer celebrated their first anniversary with a hiking trip to Colorado. They were married in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. No kids yet, only a spoiled basenji mix named Maxine lives with them in Austin, TX where David is a Senior Project manager for Compaq at pcorder.com. Zachira has been doing some materials research after completing her MS in Aerospace Engineering at UT Austin and has a paper being published at the end of the year. When the two are not traveling, you can find them at the lake or working on finishing updating their house. As they wrote this, they were getting ready to spend a week in the Caribbean with friends on a yacht. Janet Woods is starting a Master's program in Construction Management this fall at Arizona State. So far she likes it, and she's sure she'll love it when the temperature gets down below 100. Jonathan Kohl has finally settled down in Indiana after completing grad school at Rice and then spending a year in Japan as a missionary. Since April he has been working in the marketing department of Eli Lilly & Co. and absolutely loves it! Check for his new address on the Online Alumni Directory. He would love to hear from old friends! Jose M. Plehn-Dujowich '96 and Anna Maria Tomassini, both currently living in Chicago, Illinois, were married in Dallas in July. Other MIT grads in attendance were Melanie Rodriguez Russell '93, Tariq Shaukat '94, Leah Abraham '93, and Amy Weaver '92. They honeymooned in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands. In March 1998, Dave Spetman left Stanford to work on a PhD at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Although he had plenty of funding, dictated his own research topic, and had a great advisor, about a year ago he finally decided to attend seminary...something which he had been mulling over for years. He recently started classes at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, IL, and is working on a Master of Divinity degree with an emphasis in apologetics. Future plans may include high school physics teacher and/or pastoral ministry and/or something else. He is energized by the prospect of talking about God and expositing the Bible as his vocation. After tiring of living in an apartment building in Ohio, Astrid (Richter) Allen and her husband bought a house in October, 1997. They didn't get to live there very long, however, because during their vacation to South Africa over Christmas the VP of Europe for Timken and Co. offered them both jobs in the company's brand new acquisition in Romania. The entire negotiation happened over the cell phone as they traveled from game farms (that's where they keep the lions and elephants and such) to the beaches of Cape Town. So starting in January of 1998, they basically commuted to Romania while finalizing all the moving details. "For anyone considering this approach - don't do it." Since they would spend only two to three weeks in either place, they ended up being almost constantly afflicted with serious jet lag. Anyway, by May they had moved to Romania permanently. Astrid was part of a team of 4 Ex-Pats (the plant has over 1000 people in it) and she covered technology advancement. She did whatever it took to improve the quality of the product manufactured by the plant to Timken performance levels. It was challenging because they had to upgrade or purchase equipment and had very tight time lines, but it was interesting and she learned a huge amount. Earlier this year they returned to the states and now they are dealing with all the joys of being homeowners! Astrid has been to acting as a kind of internal consultant as the company is going through some interesting changes. Eugene Lin was recently a groomsman in the wedding of Ross Yu and Kristen Lohman in San Jose. He saw a ton of people from school whom he hadn't seen in a long time. "It was great! I got to swing dance in a tux, which was a first for me," he reports. Brian Blatnik graduated from b-school at Kellogg in June and started a new position at Cisco Systems, San Jose. He'll be in the cable and wireless division, on a business analysis team. In June 2000, Christopher Barrington-Leigh will be graduating with a PhD in Applied Physics from Stanford and moving to an island of Fiji in the South Pacific to RETIRE! In March 1999, he won a "small" California lottery which will let him retire now and live comfortably hereafter! Yes, it can happen to your friends! This past July he got married to his long-time girlfriend Marcia Zlepfsky. They are currently living happily in Palo Alto until he finishes up. Babak Azad has left Credit Suisse First Boston and is now attending Stanford Business School. Congratulations to Shirley Lin and Jay Moore, who were married in September. Eileen Stephens learned to snowboard on Tokyo's indoor ski slope and is now looking forward to the winter. Over the summer she went to Greece for two weeks. The first week was a chartered sailboat around the Dodecanese Islands including Leros, Marathi, Agonothissi, and Samos. The second week she was backpacking from Athens to Crete where she did an amazing 18km hike through the Samarian Gorge and saw the ruins of Knossos, then stopped in Mykonos on my way back to Crete. On the way back to Tokyo she stopped in Singapore for a day and took in the sights. She actually ran into Ioannis Harizopoulos '96 completely by chance on Mykonos. Also, she is finally hiring someone who starts October 1 to take over the most frustrating 75% of her job - customer complaints - so she can now concentrate on Japan product development for Guidant. Ben Reis is almost finished with his PhD at Cambridge University, England, and is planning to start a post-doc in computers and medicine at HST (HMS/MIT) back in Boston in the fall. "The original Cambridge is really quite a nice place to visit, should anyone else be passing by these parts."
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