AVENUE OF GIANTS!
The AVENUE OF GIANTS recognition honors graduates of Redwood High School who have made a significant contribution to society or achieved substantial professional success. The candidate must be of such exemplary character and achievement as to be worthy of emulation by current Redwood students. The candidate must have graduated at least fifteen years prior to being nominated.
2013 Online Avenue of Giants Nomination Form or downloadable 2013 AOG FormThe Avenue of Giants Banquet will be on March 1, 2013!
CONGRATULATIONS!
2012 Redwood High School Distinguished Alumni Avenue of Giants
ANTHONY JAMES BARKOVICH (1970) Dr. Barkovich has made outstanding contributions to his specialty Pediatric Neuroradiology, a field in which MRI and CAT Scan help diagnose and understand diseases of the nervous system. He graduated from UC Davis in chemistry in 1974, earned a M.S. from Berkeley then joined the U.S. Army and earned a medical degree at George Washington University in 1980. After a residency in radiology, he had a fellowship in neuroradiology at Walter Reed,1984-86. He was then appointed Professor of Radiology at University of California San Francisco. He was the first to describe several brain malformations and with others discovered the causative genes and mechanisms for a number of disorders. He made significant contributions to understanding the causes of epilepsy and in using MRI to image babies’ brains. He received many research grants from the National Institute of Health and published extensively. He has received awards from the United Cerebral Palsy Foundation and several Neurology and Neuroradiology societies.
GILLIAN BENET SELLA (1983) Gillian Benet Sella, one of America’s preeminent harpists, graduated cum laude from Harvard University and earned her Master of Music and doctoral degrees from the Juilliard School. At Juilliard she was selected for the prestigious Sony E.S. Musical Excellence Award in 1993. That year she also won the Artists International Competition, with it a solo recital debut at Carnegie Hall. She twice won first prize in the American Harp Society National Competition. Gillian has made numerous solo appearances in the U.S. and abroad. Currently Principal Harpist of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Gillian was formerly Principal Harpist of the Israel Philharmonic and the Kennedy Center Opera Orchestra. She is Adjunct Assistant Professor at Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and will be on the jury of the USA International Harp Competition in 2013. Gillian can be heard on many solo, chamber and orchestral recordings on the Telarc and Koch labels. She lives with her husband and three children in Cincinnati.
DRUMMOND PIKE (1966) According to one of his Redwood classmates, activist Drummond Pike was always a leader. At UC Santa Cruz he was elected Campus Representative (student body president) and earned an A.B. in political science. After an M.A. from Rutgers, just 10 years after graduation from Redwood, he founded the nonprofit Tides Foundation, a pioneer donor advised fund, which in 2010 made over $143 million in grants in the U.S. and the world to organizations working for economic and social justice, democracy, and a sustainable and healthy environment. He was CEO of the Tides Network, including the Foundation, until October of 2010. Under his innovative leadership in the 1990s the Tides Foundation became a provider of a range of services for nonprofits. In 2006 he was awarded the National Philanthropy Day’s Outstanding Foundation Professional Award. A licensed commercial river guide in the Grand Canyon, in 2006, he received the Mark Dubois Award from Friends of the River.
MARK FAINARU-WADA (1983) With his colleague Lance Williams, investigative reporter Mark Fainaru-Wada broke one of the foremost sports stories our times, the BALCO Case, about star athletes who used drugs to enhance their performance. The story helped reform professional baseball and other sports. The two reporters wrote a best selling book, Game of Shadows Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal That Rocked Professional Sports. Covering the BALCO story, Fainaru-Wada refused to name a source and was threatened with an 18-month prison term until the source came forth voluntarily. His reporting on the story earned him a string of national honors including the George Polk Award, the Edgar A. Poe Award, the Dick Schaap Excellence in Journalism and the Associated Press Sports Editors awards. He graduated from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism and covered sports for a series of local and national publications. He now works for ESPN.
2011 Redwood High School Distinguished Alumni Avenue of Giants
MICHELE DE NEVERS (1972) As Senior Manager for the Environment Department of the World Bank, Michele de Nevers has been closely involved in the United Nations Convention on Climate Change and led development of 2011 World Bank Group corporate Environment Strategy. She is responsible for the Bank’s activities on climate change, biodiversity, natural resource management, corporate environmental and social responsibility, pollution management, and environmental economics and policy. She works with a staff of 90 and a $30 million budget. With the World Bank Institute from 2000 to 2008, she was a director of Capacity Development Programs in human development, poverty reduction, sustainable development and finance and private sector development and helped launch the Bank’s greening and corporate social and environmental reporting initiatives. Before that appointment she worked in various capacities with the Bank including Manager for the Environment Group for Eastern Europe and Central Asia and as chief of the Mexico and Central America Environment Unit. From 1976 to 1978 she served in the Peace Corp in the Philippines. She earned a B.A in bacteriology at UC Berkeley and M.S. in management and finance from M.I.T. She has served on a number of boards including currently as advisor for the Wolfensohn Center of the Brookings Institution.
PETER H. FISHER (1978) Peter Fisher has been a full professor of physics at M.I.T. since 2001 and currently head of the Division of Experimental Particle and Nuclear Physics responsible for recruiting and educating graduate students. He earned his B.S. in engineering physics at UC Berkeley and a Ph.D. from Cal Tech. His main work recently includes developing a new dark matter detector and experiments to search for dark matter and antimatter. He was also on a team that designed and constructed the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer that flew on the space shuttle Discovery to search for antimatter in cosmic rays. Fisher has 26 peer-reviewed articles and over 300 other publications to his credit and has served on several review panels and editorial boards. He was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society, received a Ferry Fund Research Award and the Buechner Teaching Prize for excellence in physics teaching. His early work on dark matter had significant impact demonstrating that dark matter was not a heavy neutrino and the need for a new theory. As a leader of a group from Johns Hopkins where he was a professor from 1989 to 1994, Fisher made important measurements on the Large Electron-Positron collider at CERN that will hold sway for some time. And his work on double beta decay while a junior research fellow at Cal Tech and on the staff of an institute in Switzerland from 1988 to 1989 also holds up as the best measurement to date.
KEVIN LESKO (1974) Physicist Kevin Lesko holds a joint appointment with UC Berkeley and the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and holds adjunct faculty positions at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. He received a B.S. from Stanford and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington and completed a post doc at the Argonne National Laboratory and one at the Berkeley Lab. In 1987 shortly after joining the Berkeley Lab, Lesko led a team from the Lab in an international collaboration involving 70 scientists to engineering, build, and install the major detector component of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) in a cavern two kilometers underground in Canada for the study of neutrinos. As the head of the Neutrino Astrophysics Group at the Lab, Lesko has been involved in analyzing data from SNO which led to some important revelations about how neutrinos change as they emit from the sun’s core and that they account for a small percentage of all dark matter, but are equal in mass to the all the stars and galaxies. In 2004 he led a team of scientists from several institutions in the Homestake Collaboration to develop a proposal for a underground research facility in a former gold mine in South Dakota, an ideal site reaching from the surface to 8,000 feet down for the study of neutrinos, dark matter, proton decay, and nuclear astrophysics that would make the U.S. the leader in underground physics. Lesko is now Principal Investigator for the National Science Foundations’ Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL), if funded would begin construction in 2014. He was elected a fellow in the American Physical Society, received a Japan Society for Promotion of Science Fellowship and received Berkeley Lab’s Outstanding Performance Awards for 1993, 1999, 2000, and 2003. In collaboration with other scientists, he has written over 100 peer-reviewed articles including the recent articles from the SNO and KamLAND experiments proving that neutrinos have mass, transform between neutrino species, and represent some of the first hints of physics not explained by the Standard Model.
DAVID STRATHAIRN (1966) When HBO’s Temple Grandin won a number of Emmys last summer, David Strathairn won an Emmy for supporting actor. In 2005, for his leading role as news commentator Edward R. Murrow in Good Night and Good Luck, Strathairn received Best Actor Golden Globe, Independent Spirit Award, and Screen Actors Guild and Academy Award nominations. After college he worked as a clown touring the country for several months. He began his acting career in 1980 in a film directed by John Sayles, a friend from Williams College, and has acted in number of Sayles’ films including Matewan, Passion Fish, Limbo, The Brother From Another Planet, and City of Hope for which Strathairn won the Independent Spirit Award. He has also appeared with Meryl Streep in The River Wild and Silkwood, Robert Redford in Sneakers, Tom Cruise in The Firm, Matt Damon in The Bourne Ultimatum and Kim Bisinger in L.A. Confidential, a film that won a Screen Actors Guild nomination for cast performance. Strathairn has appeared on television most notably in a recurring role in The Sopranos, the acclaimed series The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd and as J. Robert Oppenheimer in the Emmy-award-winning TV drama, Day One. Strathairn received a CableACE nomination for guest actor in a dramatic series for his role in the HBO movie, In the Gloaming. An accomplished stage actor, he has appeared in over thirty plays including several by Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter both on and off Broadway including Strindberg’s Dance of Death, Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Oscar Wilde’s Salome. In 1966 he played Prospero in Carey Perloff’s production of The Tempest at the re-opening of the Geary Theater in San Francisco.
2010 Redwood High School Distinguished Alumni Avenue of Giants
GUNNAR CARLSSON (1969) received his Ph.D. in Mathematics at Stanford in 1976. He taught and did research at University of Chicago, University of California (San Diego), and Princeton University before returning to the Stanford Mathematics Department in 1991. He has held an Alfred P. Sloan fellowship, spoken at the International Congress of Mathematicians, and has published 85 papers. Until ten years ago his work concentrated on algebraic topology (within pure mathematics) Since then he concentrated on adapting the topological methods to help understand data arising in numerous scientific and engineering problems.
B.A., Mathematics, Harvard University
PhD, Mathematics, Stanford
STEVEN J. MCCORMICK (1969), lifelong environmentalist, is president of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, a private entity committed to environmental conservation and scientific research. McCormick was president and CEO of The Nature Conservancy from 2001-2007 where he oversaw an operating budget of more than $500M. Earlier in his tenure at TNC as Western Regional Legal Counsel, he created Conservation by Design, the strategic framework that now guides all the TNC work in 29 countries. McCormick has also served on the U.C. Berkeley College of Natural Resources Advisory Board, the Advisory Board of the Harvard Business School Social Enterprise initiative, and the Sustainable Conservation Board.
B.S., Agricultural Economics, University of California, Berkeley
J.D., University of California Hastings College of Law.
NICHOLAS B. SUNTZEFF (1970) holds the Mitchell/Heep/ Munnerlyn Chair in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University. He is also adjunct Professor of Astronomy at the University of Texas, and Deputy Director for the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy. He is an internationally recognized observational cosmologist, and led groups which discovered Dark Energy and measured the most precise expansion of the Universe to date. Dark Energy, also known as the cosmological constant, was predicted by Einstein in 1917, and comprises 73% of the mass/energy of the entire Universe. Prior to A&M he was Associate Director of Science for the US National Optical Observatories, and lived in La Serena Chile for 20 years. He was elected Vice President of the American Astronomical Society in 2010 and serves on the Astrophysics Subcommittee of the NASA Advisory Council, overseeing all NASA astrophysics projects including the Hubble Space Telescope. His High-Z Supernova Team was awarded the Gruber Cosmology prize, considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in cosmology. In 1983, he was awarded the international Robert Trumpler Prize for the outstanding PhD thesis of the year in astronomy and astrophysics. He is presently on leave, working as a Jefferson Senior Science Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences at the Department of State in Washington DC in the Office of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs.
BS with distinction in Mathematics, Stanford University
PhD Astronomy and Astrophysics University of California, Santa Cruz and Lick Observatory
Redwood High School's 2009 Inaugural Class of Distinguished Alumni
STEVE FAINARU (1980), a Washington Post correspondent, won the Pulitzer Prize for International reporting in 2008 for his stories on how private security contractors in Iraq operate outside the law. He was also a finalist for this award in 2006. His book, Big Boy Rules, on this same topic was published this spring. He has worked for the Post since 2000, where he also worked as an investigative reporter on topics ranging from civil liberties to sports. He worked for the Boston Globe for 11 years and is co-author of The Duke of Havana: Baseball, Cuba and the Search for the American Dream. B.A., University of Missouri, M.A., Columbia University.
DON FRANCIS, M.D., D.Sc (1960) has provided leadership in the discovery and control of HIV, the eradication of smallpox, and the control of Ebola hemorrhagic fever. He initially directed the AIDS laboratory at the Center for Disease Control, and his early warnings about AIDS were chronicled in Randy Shilts And the Band Played On about the beginnings of the AIDS epidemic. In 2004, he co-founded Global Solutions for Infectious Diseases (GSID) and serves as Executive Director and principal investigator for their dengue fever program. He attended College of Marin and the University of California, Berkeley, received his M. D. at Northwestern University and his Doctor of Science in Virology at Harvard University.
THE HONORABLE GAVIN NEWSOM (1985) is the youngest San Francisco mayor in more than 100 years. His decision to grant marriage licenses to same sex couples gained worldwide attention for the issue. He initiated the plan to bring universal health care to all of the city’s uninsured residents. He has established other programs ranging from harnessing local solutions to global climate change to easing the problems of the homeless. He is a likely candidate for governor in the next election. He is a founder of PlumpJack, an enterprise of wineries, restaurants and hotels. B.A., Santa Clara University.
MARTHA OLNEY, PhD (1974) an Adjunct Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, was a recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award in 2003 at Cal and was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 1991 along with numerous other teaching awards. She also presents workshops on teaching to the Berkeley faculty & graduate students and teaches economics to high school teachers in summer professional development programs. She was a co–author of Essentials of Economics with Paul Krugman, the 2008 Nobel Prize winner in economics, and has published many other economics texts. B.S., University of Redlands (magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa); PhD, University of California, Berkeley.
AMBASSADOR DENNIS ROSS (1966) was appointed in February 2009 to be Special Advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Gulf matters. Previously, he served as the lead negotiator on the Arab-Israeli conflict in the administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He was awarded a Presidential Medal by President Clinton and has received the State Department’s highest award twice. Ross is the author of The Missing Peace, in which he detailed his work to forge accords in the Middle East. His book entitled, Statecraft and How to Restore America’s Standing in the World, was termed “important and illuminating” by the New York Times. His latest book, Myths, Illusions and Peace, will be published in June. BA: University of California, Los Angeles; PhD, University of California, Los Angeles.
ERIC SCHMITT (1978) currently reports on terrorism issues for the New York Times, where in 1999 he was part of a Pulitzer Prize team of reporters who investigated how China was able to obtain sensitive U. S. military technology. Since joining the Times staff in 1983, Mr. Schmitt has reported from Congress, the Pentagon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Haiti and Somalia and covered the 1991 Persian Gulf War. He was one of the main reporters assigned to the impeachment proceeding against President Bill Clinton. He served as assistant to senior columnist James Reston when he first came to the Times. He attended Harvard University's program on National and International Security in 1991, and was awarded a Knight Journalism Fellowship to Stanford University in 2006-07. B.A., Williams College.
DINA TEMPLE-RASTON (1982) is a correspondent for National Public Radio, where she covers counter-terrorism. She was City Hall Bureau Chief for the New York Sun and formerly worked for Bloomberg News in Asia, where she was responsible for opening Bloomberg's Shanghai and Hong Kong offices.She was White House correspondent for Bloomberg News for both terms of the Clinton administration and is the author of four books. Her first, A Death in Texas, was chosen by the Washington Post as one of the best books of 2002. She has also written books on Rwanda and civil liberties in America post-911. Her most recent book, The Jihad Next Door, is about homegrown terrorism in America. She speaks Chinese Arabic, and French. B.A., Northwestern University; Liaoning University, Shenyang, China; M.A., Columbia University.
JAY WEAVER (1973) has been a legal affairs reporter for the past ten years at the Miami Herald, where he covers the state and federal courts. In 2001, he was part of a Herald team that won the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of Elian Gonzalez, a six-year-old Cuban at the center of an international custody battle. Weaver and his colleagues detailed the pre-dawn federal raid to seize the boy from his Miami relatives and reunite him with his Cuban father. This year, the Miami Herald nominated Weaver for a Pulitzer Prize for his series showing how South Florida doctors and clinics defrauded the Medicare program of billions of dollars. As a result of his work, judges imposed tougher prison sentences, Congress sought more oversight of Medicare, and claims totaling hundreds of millions of dollars were denied. In March, Weaver's series won first place in the 75th National Headliner Awards for Health, Medical and Science Writing. Earlier, after the 2000 Florida presidential election dispute, Weaver contributed to a Herald staff book, Democracy Held Hostage. Weaver got his start in journalism at the Daily American in Rome, Italy. B.A., University of California, Berkeley.
DONALD KREPS (Redwood High’s Principal 1957-1979) is recognized in this one-time-only non-alumni award for his inspirational leadership which created the foundation for the quality of education at Redwood High School. He was the founding Principal of Redwood, creating the spirit and high expectations for students and staff alike. His qualities of mentorship, high ethical standards and kindness permeated Redwood during his tenure. He allowed staff and students to challenge themselves in creating a positive educational atmosphere. After resigning as Principal in 1979, Mr. Kreps stayed on at Redwood as a Math and Physics teacher before retiring in 1983. Following his retirement, he taught Math and Physics at The Branson School for an additional nine years. B.S., Stanford , M.A., Stanford.
Last updated 1.22.2012
