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Received Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from UC Berkeley in 1976 and became a J. Robert Oppenheimer Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Returned to UC Berkeley in 1979 as Assistant Professor of Chemistry where he was a Sloan Research Fellow and a Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar. Joined Amoco Corporation in 1985 and was a founder of Amoco Laser Company in 1987, starting as its Director of R&D, holding a series of executive positions in technical and business management, and becoming its senior executive as Chief Operating Officer in 1995. Led the sale of the company to Scientific-Atlanta in 1996, where he became Vice President and General Manager of its optoelectronics business and grew that business four-fold to $250 million between 1998 and 2000. Appointed to his present position as President, CEO, and Chairman of iolon, Inc. in November, 2000, where he has led the company through its major venture funding round, the successful launch of its first products, and its establishment as the leading supplier of tunable optical components to the optical communications industry. He and his wife Ruth (UCSB BA, '71) met at UCSB in 1968 and married on graduation day in 1971. Their daughter Cynthia (UCSB, '04) is a CCS Biology major.
Given the myriad ways my CCS education has supported and shaped much of my subsequent life and career, I wish I could claim to have had the foresight as a high school senior to have fully appreciated the wonder of CCS. But it was not so. I understood that CCS offered freedom, and I was certain that a brand new college of fifty students would surely be more interesting than an established college of ten thousand, but that was about it. Yet at 17 those features plus the nearby ocean were more than sufficient motivators, so I applied and soon found myself at UCSB in the Fall of 1967 as a CCS Chemistry major.
By that time my high school experience had taught me that while science was a fascinating field, the practice of science was rote and mundane. I wanted something grand and creative and challenging, and I had decided that literature and writing, not chemistry, was where I would find it. So I sought out Marvin Mudrick. He seemed bemused by the idea of someone forsaking science for his field, said I was welcome to take his graduate Chaucer class to get started in literature, but suggested that I see what chemistry was like at the university level before I made up my mind. And at our first CCS chemistry freshman seminar, Bernie Kirtman walked five of us through group theory in two hours with the enthusiasm and fervor of a man possessed. At the end of that first session Bernie was covered in chalk dust, the black board was covered with molecular diagrams, and I was convinced that chemistry was the most interesting and exciting field imaginable.
That first week set the stage and the pattern for the next four years. Wonderful teachers and great mentors who forgave our youth and ignorance and were as excited in sharing their knowledge and understanding for the nth time as we were in hearing it for the first, most wonderful time. In L&S classes I took the math and chemistry and physics sequences along with the rest of the known world, but in CCS I worked on real problems. Problems that hadn't been solved, questions that hadn't been answered, and maybe even the chance to ask questions that hadn't been asked before. David Harris taught five of us physical chemistry with the help of half a million dollars from NSF, the Culler-Fried on-line system, and ARPAnet. Herb Broida let me build lasers and taught me how to use them to tickle a molecule to reveal its structure. While my L&S classes taught me science, CCS taught me to be a scientist. And because CCS defines breadth as different fields of study, not as a list of approved classes, literature for me was Chaucer in Old English from Marvin Mudrick and Eliot and Joyce from Hugh Kenner. Biology was Bruce Rickborn teaching me how to use gas chromatography and mass spectroscopy to figure out how chamisa ahrubs wage chemical warfare on their fellow plants in the chaparral.
The CCS-wide activites usually focussed on visitors that Mudrick convinced to spend time in residence at CCS. Jacques d'Amboise not only danced for us, but focussed his astonishing energy and intensity on us off the stage to open our eyes to the world of dancing and dancers. Buckminster Fuller's CCS colloquia on his Design Science or geodesic domes would typically seamlessly evolve into a group of us in a discussion with him about his latest thinking, which in those days was centered on some aspect of his newly-coined concept of "Spaceship Earth".
That the unique and special qualities of CCS were so different from the norm made it a truly radical concept. At least in those early years, that also meant it was fragile. From my own conversations with Mudrick I know that he had absolute conviction that CCS had the vitality to evolve and grow and survive. But I also know that he was acutely aware that it was woefully vulnerable to extinction. For my own part, the fate I most feared for CCS was not death, but reversion to the norm. Could CCS grow to over 300 students and survive within an institutional bureaucracy for more than 30 years without losing its soul? To my great relief, I've found that the CCS of my daughter's generation has retained its essential character and uniqueness. You just have to talk to today's CCS students to learn this for yourself. They simply can't contain their excitement and enthusiasm for what they're doing in today's CCS. I've even heard a few things that sound almost as cool as hanging out with Buckminster Fuller.
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