FIRST AMONG WOMEN
Barbara Liskov, MS ’66, PhD ’68, the first woman in the United States to earn a doctorate in computer science, has won her field’s highest honor: the Turing Award. Now a professor at MIT, Liskov was lauded for her achievements in programming language design, which the Association for Computing Machinery calls “the basis of every important programming language since 1975.” At Stanford, her dissertation was “A Program to Play Chess Endgames.”
MIDAS TOUCH
That cliché about sitting on a gold mine? Well, Roman Shklanka can tell whether you actually are. Shklanka, PhD ’63, has identified mines that have panned out in Papua New Guinea, Australia, Guyana, Tanzania and Brazil. For this, the “mine finder” has been honored with a lifetime achievement award: induction into the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame.
SWIMMING FOR HIS SISTER
Let’s say you’re a former Stanford water polo player, and your sister experiences chronic pain from hydrocephalus. You want to do something to help her and 1 million other Americans with the condition, which causes fluid to accumulate in the brain. So what do you do? Pull on swim trunks and jump into the Bay. Peter Finlayson, ’05, MA ’08, heads up Team Hydro, which also includes graduate student Mike Bailey, Nick Ellis, ’02, Ryan Kent, ’11, Ryan McCarthy, ’09, Tim Norton, ’12, Greg Osborn, ’70, MBA ’74, Kathy Wright, ’78, Sage Wright, ’10, and Steven Wright, ’08. (Sam Finlayson, ’11, co-founded the team with his brother last year but can’t participate this year.) The 25-member group aims to raise $20,000 for the Hydrocephalus Association by participating in Sharkfest, a 1.7-mile swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco on August 15.
BIG SKY, BIG DEBUT
Bill Pack grew up in rural Montana in, as he puts it, “an environment beset by addiction, abuse, poverty and mental illness.” At 15, he was emancipated; at 16, he dropped out of high school; at 17, he married; at 18, he became a father. He worked as a truck driver, bartender, fry cook, dock worker and broadcast ad man before rising to become the youngest executive vice president/divisional director at Smith Barney Shearson. Then, at 43, after a health crisis, he quit the financial industry to enroll at Stanford. Now, Pack, ’03, has written a novel, The Bottom of the Sky (Riverbend): a rags-to-riches family saga that takes its protagonist from Montana to Silicon Valley, and back again.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICANS
Michael Duca, ’04, Tom Shepard, ’91, Tina DiFeliciantonio, MA ’87, and Jane C. Wagner, MA ’88, have made Whiz Kids, a documentary that follows three high schoolers competing in the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search. At a time when U.S. teens rank 24th in the world in science, the filmmakers say, the sheer brilliance of the Talent Search finalists is cause for hope.
WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE
MeiMei Fox, ’94, MA ’95, joined Alexandra Cousteau (granddaughter of Jacques) as a writer on Expedition: Blue Planet, a 100-day, four-continent exploration of water issues around the globe. Her blog from the expedition can be read at bluelegacy.net.
Photographer and author John Weller has received the Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation, a $150,000 award over three years. Weller, ’97, will focus on creating awareness about the Ross Sea in Antarctica, one of the world’s last pristine marine environments—and one that faces long-term risk from large-scale fishing.
