Andrew Leonard has made a career of producing pictures from stuff you can’t see—with the naked eye, that is. He specializes in electron micrography, making digital images from scans of microscopic objects. His vast portfolio includes adult stem cells, like the one shown in “Cell Division,” as well as cat dander, kidney-stone crystals and a hormone that stimulates hair follicles. He once took close-ups of dental plaque, which he allows was “pretty disgusting.” Weird? Well, not to Leonard’s clients, who range from pharmaceutical companies to major news organizations. The New York-based photographer hopes soon to become one of the first to make an image of a human embryonic stem cell. “We have been to outer space, but inner space hasn’t been explored,” says Leonard, who also directs a digital media office at Manhattan’s Hospital for Special Surgery. “There is much to be discovered.”
Ann Marsh liked her freshman roommate, Liz Pyle, but thought they were pretty different. “I entered prepared to barely scrape by in calculus—which I did—and here was Liz doing graduate-level math,” says Marsh, ’88. The Boston-bred Pyle, she believes, “was able to accept, tolerate and at some level really appreciate this Valley Girl with a liberal-arts orientation who had moved in.” As Marsh reports in “Roommate Roulette,” Stanford strives to pair freshmen who have both similarities and differences. A veteran journalist who has worked for the Hartford Courant, the Prague Post and Forbes, Marsh is now writing the authorized biography of Paul Orfalea, the founder of Kinko’s. And she’s getting married August 30 to Johanne Jayaratne, the winning candidate among the 100 men she met through online dating—an experience she chronicled in the February issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. “Here I am,” she laughs, “about to have my first roommate in more than 11 years.”
The Farm tugs at Susan Wells like a magnet. “I just keep coming back, and enjoying it,” says Wels, ’78, who interned with the Stanford Alumni Association as an English and communication major and later served briefly as STANFORD’s managing editor (1980). Since then, she has authored or edited more than a dozen books, including Jasper Ridge: A Stanford Sanctuary (SAA, 1990), The Olympic Spirit (Collins, 1996), the national bestseller Titanic (Time Life, 1997), Stanford: Portrait of a University (SAA, 1999), Pearl Harbor (Time Life, 2001) and A Day in the Life of Africa (Tides, 2002). “I’ve been on assignment in Thailand, Israel, Ireland, France, South Africa and the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean,” says Wels, who lives in San Francisco with her husband, David Hagerman, and their 17-year-old daughter, Casey. But writing about circus aerialist Susan Voyticky, ’95 (On the Job), opened “a whole different world I’d never even thought about,” she says. Today’s circus demands “an amazing, scary blend of skill and art,” Wels reports. Was she tempted to try it? “No way!”
