Notable Alumni

Daima Lockhart Clark (IH 1938-39)
Scholar of African philosophy and religion

Daima Lockhart Clark (also known as Daima May Clark) was married to late artist Claude Clark. She received her first master’s degree in 1941 in philosophy. Then, in 1967, she received two additional master’s degrees in theology and religious education from Pacific School of Religion. In 1974 she was ordained by the Alamo Black Clergy. She also founded the Association of Africans and African-Americans in 1978. After her husband died April 1st, 2001, that same year, she founded the Claude Clark Memorial Scholarship Fund and has been providing scholarships/awards to students of Oakland for approximately 16 years. The foundation is currently still under the care of Daima.

"If I had not come to I-House, the experiences and great opportunities that I have had since then simply would not have been possible.”

Edith Simon Coliver (IH 1940-43)
First female Field Office Director for the Asia Foundation

Edith Smith was born in Karlsruhe, Germany in 1922. She moved to London with her family in 1936 after being denied an academic award for being Jewish. Two years later, she and her family moved to San Francisco, California. She received her bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley, studying International Relations and Languages. Coliver graduated as the summa cum laude. In 1945 she worked as a translator at the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco and a few years after that, she went back to Germany and translated the pretrial testimony for high-ranking Nazi officer Hermann Goering. After her years of being an interpreter, she worked with Jewish refugees in a camp taken over by the U.S. Army. In 1954, Edith worked for the Asia Foundation and then in 1979, she moved to Manila where she headed the foundation’s Philippines office. She then headed the foundation’s Taiwan office in 1988 until her retirement in 1992. Though a majority of her career was mainly focused on Asia, her communal work focused a lot in the Middle East. She was a founding member of the Women’s Interfaith Dialogue on the Middle East and served on both the national and international boards of the New Israel Fund. She served on the boards of the American Friends of Hebrew University, American Friends of Neve Shalom/Wahat al Salam, International House of UC Berkeley, and the Institute for International Education.

“Our greatest pleasure in those days was the folk dance evenings, where students from different, and sometimes hostile, countries danced with each other in friendship and harmony.”

Delbert Wong (IH 1940)
First Chinese-American judge in the continental U.S.

Delbert E. Wong was born May 17^th, 1920 in Hanford, California and was raised not too far from Bakersfield, California. He attended Bakersfield College where he received his Associate of Arts degree and then transferred to UC Berkeley. After leaving UC Berkeley, Wong joined the Army Air Corps during World War II and became one of eleven B-17 Flying Fortress navigators to graduate in his class at Mather Field in Sacramento. In 1949, Wong became the first Chinese American graduate of Stanford Law School. He was the first Asian American to be appointed Deputy Legislative Counsel serving the California State Legislature, and the first Asian American to be appointed a Deputy State Attorney General. During his time as Deputy State Attorney General, he was appointed to the Municipal Court of the Los Angeles Judicial District in 1959 which made him the first Chinese American to sit on the bench in the continental United States. Two years later, Wong was elevated to the Superior Court in which he served for over 20 years. Judge Wong died on March 10^th, 2006 at the age of 85.

Hugh Macbeth, Jr. (IH 1941-44)
Lawyer and Advocate of Japanese Americans

Hugh E. Macbeth Jr, who died Sept. 14, 2019 at the age of 100, was an extraordinary figure. In fall 1941, Hugh Jr. enrolled at UC Berkeley’s law school and became active within International House. In collaboration with his father, Hugh resisted the infamous 9066 Executive Order imposed on Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. Hugh Jr. became a partner in his father’s firm, and the Macbeth family's work on instrumental cases such as People v. Oyama not only halted enforcement of the Alien Land Act against Japanese Americans, but established the legal grounds for future Supreme Court civil rights cases. His thirty years of private practice were a testament to his discipline. But looking for other challenges, he applied for the judicial office of Commissioner of the Superior Court. In short order, he was administering the largest Family Law court in Los Angeles County, supervising a staff of counselors and mediators, and taking the most contentious cases for himself. It was a very good fit. His technical mastery of the law joined his compassion for the ordinary lives it touched. From his May 14th, 1941 Application for Admission to I-House, Mr. Macbeth wrote: “The International House provides an opportunity for inter-stimulation of people of widely variant social, cultural, national, and racial backgrounds. More than this, it provides the only true medium through which foreign people can know, understand, sympathize, and fully realize the essential unity of all mankind and their community of purpose and problem, that is, personal and continued contact. My immediate parental background is such that the need for international and interracial understanding and cooperation has been deeply impressed upon me. Nor am I oblivious of world conditions today which shout that same need.”

Emmett Rice (IH 1947-48)
Fulbright scholar, member of the Federal Reserve Board and Berkeley’s first African-American firefighter

Emmett John Rice was born on December 21st, 1919 in Florence, South Carolina. He studied at the City College of New York, receiving a B.B.A. in 1941 and an M.B.A. in 1942. After that, he joined the U.S. Army Air Force in World War II, serving with the Tuskegee Airmen. After the war, he earned a Ph.D. in economics at UC Berkeley and was a Fulbright scholar in India. Rice was a research assistant in economics at Berkeley from 1950-51 and then became a teaching assistant in economics, teaching from 1953-54. The year before he became a teaching assistant, he was a research associate at the Reserve Bank of India as a Fulbright Fellow. From 1964 to 1966, Rice was Deputy Director, then Acting Director, of the Treasury Department's Office of Developing Nations. From 1966 to 1970, he was U.S. Alternate Executive Director for the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank), the International Development Association, and the International Finance Corporation. In 1972 he left public service to assume the position of senior vice president of the National Bank of Washington. Emmett was then appointed to the Federal Reserve Board in 1979. He passed away in 2011 at his home in Camas, Washington at the age of 91.

Julianne Cartwright Traylor (IH 1968-69)
First African-American woman to serve as Chair of Amnesty International

Julianne Cartwright Traylor graduated from Skidmore in 1968. She served as Chair of Amnesty International USA Board of Directors. She was the first African-American woman to chair the organization. A resident of International House in 1968-69, Ms. Traylor is a human rights educator, researcher, consultant and grassroots activist specializing in the fields of international human rights law and policies, the United Nations, and development and gender issues. She is a noted organizer and frequent speaker on U.S. and international human rights issues for Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s), civic organizations, schools, universities and law schools.

“I-House meant a lot to me. It was my community, a multi-cultural one par excellence. The world needs the type of environment that I-House fosters.”

Khatharya Um (IH 1983-88)
Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies
First Cambodian woman to earn a doctorate in the U.S.
Recipient of the Fukuoka Academic Prize (2023)(link is external)
Recipient of the Chancellor's Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence and Equity  (2020)(link is external)

"[At I-House], accents are as common as complaints about the menu [and] one can feel not just the freedom but the pride of wearing a sarong or a sari. These are little mundane things but they mark a world of difference for those of us who find solace in diversity and in a multifaceted environment. "

Maggie Gee (IH 1950-51)
 Physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab and one of the first Chinese-American aviators of the Women Airforce Service Pilots

Maggie Gee was born August 5th, 1923 in Berkeley, California. She was an American aviator who served in the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) in World War II. Gee was one of the two Chinese American women to serve in the organization. Since female pilots were not allowed in combat at the time, she helped male pilots train for combat and also ferried military aircraft. After graduating from UC Berkeley in physics, she worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She is also featured in a number of books and documentaries. In 2010, she and other living pilots of WASP received the Congressional Gold Medal. Maggie served as an elected member of the Alameda County Democratic Central Committee for numerous decades and served on the California Democratic Party Executive Board and Asian Pacific Islander Democratic Caucus. She passed away in 2013 at the age of 89.

Pauli Murray (IH 1944-45)
Attorney, poet, and the first African-American Episcopalian minister

Anna Pauline “Pauli” Murray was born November 20th, 1910 in Baltimore. She was an American civil rights activist, women's rights activist, lawyer, Episcopal priest, and author. She graduated from Hunter College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1933. In 1940, Murray sat in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus with a friend, and they were arrested for violating state segregation laws. This incident and her subsequent involvement with the socialist Workers' Defense League led her to pursue her career goal of working as a civil rights lawyer. She then enrolled in law school at Howard University but even after graduating first in her class, she was denied to do post-graduate work at Harvard because she was a woman. She earned her master’s degree in law at UC Berkeley and after that, became the first woman to receive a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from Yale Law School. During her career as a lawyer, Murray argued for civil rights and women’s rights. She also served on the 1961-63 Presidential Commission on the Status of Women and in 1966, became the co-founder of National Organization for Women. She passed away in1985 in Pittsburgh due to pancreatic cancer.

Learn more about her remarkable life: https://www.paulimurraycenter.com/who-is-pauli(link is external)

Watch the documentary trailer, My Name is Pauli Murray(link is external).

Sandeep Pandey (IH 1988-90)
Social activist and co-founder of Asha for Education

Sandeep Pandey was born July 22nd, 1965 and is an alumni of the Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University. After that, he received his master’s in manufacturing and computer science from Syracuse University and then went to receive his doctorate in control theory at UC Berkeley which he completed in 1992. After completing his education, Pandey moved back to India and began teaching at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and thereafter, founded a registered organization called “Asha Trust”. He also leads the National Alliance of People’s Movement, the largest network of grassroots people’s movements in India. He was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award (often referred to as the “Asian Nobel prize”) in 2002 for his leadership.

Sergio Alejo Rapu Haoa (IH 2001-03)
First native islander to serve as the governor of Easter Island

“In the heart of every human being, there is a space for love, a space for peace. As long as we can respect each other’s differences, we can create a bridge to reach each other’s hearts.”

Victor Santiago Pineda Ph.D. (IH 1999-2002)
Social development scholar & disability rights advocate

Victor Santiago Pineda was born in 1978 in Caracas, Venezuela.  While attending UC Berkeley, Pineda developed his leadership skills. He was an elected Senator for the ASUC student government, defended ethnic studies, and brought back the Disabled Students Union (DSU). Also at this time, he established the Pineda Foundation in order to provide 21st-century workforce skills to youth with disabilities. Pineda earned a B.A. in Political Economy, a B.S. in Business Administration, and eventually a master’s degree in City and Regional Planning with a concentration in Regional Economic Development. In 2006, Victor received a graduate equity and diversity fellowship to pursue a doctoral degree in Urban Planning at the Luskin School for Public Affairs at UCLA. In 2009, he was awarded the US Department of Education's Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship and the Sheikh Saud Qassimi Public Policy Fellowship at the Dubai School of Government and then proceeded to receive a Ph.D. for his dissertation.

“I-House instilled in me a deep understanding of humanity and inspired me to contribute my knowledge about disability and human rights with the rest of the world.”

Click to view Victor Pineda Spoltlight flyer 

Wendell Lipscomb (IH 1947-48)
Psychiatrist, trainer of Tuskegee Airmen & first African American to complete a residency at Kaiser Hospital

Wendell was born in Berkeley in 1920. During World War II he became an instructor for the Tuskegee Airman, the first African Americans to fly airplanes for the Army Air Corps in Alabama. After the war ended, he had applied to many different airliners to become a commercial pilot, but none of them were accepting African-American pilots at the time. Since he couldn’t find stability in flying, he decided to head to college and graduated from San Diego State College in 1947 and then enrolled in medical school at UC Berkeley. Lipscomb then graduated in 1953 and soon after, he moved to Korea during the war. After returning to America, he returned to school and graduated with his master’s in public health from the University of Michigan. Wendell became the first African-American to do his residency at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland. He did not stop there though. He pursued other interests such as serving as the supervisor of the alcoholism project for the California State Department of Public Health. He also did a residence at the Mendocino State Hospital as a psychiatrist. Unfortunately, Wendell Lipscomb passed away in May of 2004 at the age of 83. 

Wendy Schmidt (IH 1978-80) I-House Alumna of the Year 2014
President and co-founder of the Schmidt Family Foundation and the Schmidt Ocean Institute (SOI)

Wendy Schmidt was born July 26^th, 1995 in Orange, New Jersey. She is married to Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google, who she met while attending graduate school at UC Berkeley (Eric is also listed as a Notable Alumnus). Wendy is known for her philanthropy. In 2005, she became a trustee of the National Resources Defense Council and founded the 11^th Hour Project to raise awareness about climate change and global warming. In 2006, Wendy and Eric Schmidt established the Schmidt Family Foundation to address issues of sustainability and the responsible use of natural resources. In 2009, Wendy and Eric Schmidt created the $25 million Schmidt Transformative Technology Fund at Princeton University to support research and technology in the natural sciences and engineering. She serves on the boards of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the California Academy of Sciences, Climate Central, the X Prize Foundation, Grist, the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute, V-Day, Maiyet, The Nantucket Dreamland Foundation and is a founding circle member of The Nantucket Project. She also serves on the America's Cup Organizing Committee in San Francisco.

“I-House meant a lot to me. It was my community, a multi-cultural one par excellence. The world needs the type of environment that I-House fosters.”

Andrew Z. Fire (IH 1977-78)
Recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Craig Mello “for their discovery of RNA interference – gene silencing by double stranded RNA

Andrew Zachary Fire was born April 27th, 1959 in Palo Alto, California. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a B.A. in mathematics in 1978 at the age of 19. He then proceeded to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a Ph.D. in biology in 1983 under the mentorship of Nobel laureate geneticist Phillip Sharp. Fire moved to Cambridge, England, as a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow. He became a member of the MRCLaboratory of Molecular Biology group headed by Nobel laureate biologist Sydney Brenner. In 2006, Fire and Craig Mello shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work first published in 1998 in the journal Nature.

Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson (IH 1946-50)
Recipient of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, awarded jointly with Ernst Otto Fisher 

Wilkinson was born July 14th, 1921 at Springside, Todmorden. In 1939, he obtained a Royal Scholarship for study at Imperial College London, from where he graduated in 1941, with his PhD awarded in 1946. In 1942, Professor Friedrich Paneth was recruiting young chemists for the nuclear energy project. Wilkinson joined and was sent out to Canada, where he stayed in Montreal and later Chalk River Laboratories until he could leave in 1946. For the next four years, he worked with Professor Glenn T. Seaborg at University of California, Berkeley, mostly on nuclear taxonomy. Wilkinson received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1973 and is well known for his writing called “Advanced Inorganic Chemistry” which is one of the standard inorganic chemistry textbooks used by students today. He died September 26th, 1996 at the age of 75.

Glenn Seaborg (IH 1934-35 non-resident member)Recipient of the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, awarded jointly with Edwin M. McMillan

Glenn Seaborg was born April 19th, 1912 in Ishpeming, Michigan. He received a Bachelor of Arts (AB) degree in chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1933 and took his Ph.D. in chemistry at UC Berkeley in 1937. Seaborg remained at the University of California, Berkeley for post-doctoral research. He followed Frederick Soddy's work investigating isotopes and contributed to the discovery of more than 100 isotopes of elements. In 1939 he became an instructor in chemistry at Berkeley, was promoted to assistant professor in 1941 and professor in 1945. In 1946, he added to his responsibilities as a professor by heading the nuclear chemistry research at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory operated by the University of California on behalf of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. Seaborg served as chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1958 to 1961. After appointment by President John F. Kennedy and confirmation by the United States Senate, Seaborg was chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) from 1961 to 1971. Glenn died February 25th, 1999 as a result of a heart attack six months prior.

Jayant Sathaye (IH 1973)
Contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former vice president AL Gore

Dr. Jayant Sathaye was Senior Scientist and Strategic Advisor and Founder of the International Energy Studies Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where he had worked since 1974. Dr. Sathaye holds a PhD degree from University of California, Irvine and a B.Tech. (Hons.) Mechanical Engineering degree from IIT Bombay and is a visiting professor at UC Berkeley. His work has focused on research, modeling and policy analysis of climate change mitigation, energy efficiency standards, building energy use (including cool roofs), power sector analysis, and forestry activities. He has been a Coordinating Lead author of eleven publications of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 1990 and is a recipient of the 2007 IPCC Nobel Peace Prize. He also received a Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Bombay in 2011.

Julian Schwinger (IH 1939-40)
Recipient of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded jointly with Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Richard P. Feynman

Julian Schwinger was born February 12^th, 1918 in New York City. He attended the City College of New York as an undergraduate before transferring to Columbia University, where he received his B.A. in 1936 and his Ph.D. (overseen by Isidor Isaac Rabi) in 1939 at the age of 21. He worked at the University of California, Berkeley and was later appointed to a position at Purdue University. While on leave from Purdue, he worked at the Radiation Laboratory at MIT. After the war, Schwinger left Purdue for Harvard University, where he taught from 1945 to 1974. Schwinger was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for his work on quantum electrodynamics (QED), along with Richard Feynman and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga. Schwinger's awards and honors were numerous even before his Nobel win. They include the first Albert Einstein Award (1951), the U.S. National Medal of Science (1964), honorary D.Sc. degrees from Purdue University (1961) and Harvard University (1962), and the Nature of Light Award of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1949). Schwinger died July 16^th, 1994 due to pancreatic cancer.

Kirk R. Smith (IH 1972)
Contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize

Kirk R. Smith is an expert on the health and climate effects of household energy use in developing nations. He is currently a professor of Global Environmental Health at the University of California, Berkeley, where his research focuses on the relationships among environmental quality, health, resource use, climate, development, and policy in developing countries. Smith grew up in the California East Bay, where he attended the University of California, Berkeley. Here, he received his Bachelor of Arts (1968) in Physics and Astronomy, his Master of Public Health (1972) in Environmental Health Sciences, and his Doctorate (PhD) (1977) in Biomedical and Environmental Health with a focus on Energy & Environment. After finishing his PhD, Smith moved to Hawaii where he founded the Energy Program at the East-West Center. He led the center's work on energy research problems in the Asia-Pacific regions until 1985, when he became the coordinator for environmental risk research. In 1995, Smith returned to UC Berkeley where he joined the faculty at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. He is currently a Professor of Global Environmental Health, the founder and co-Director of the university's Global Health and Environment Program, and Associate Director for International Programs at the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health.

Melvin Calvin (IH 1937-38)
Recipient of the 1961 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his “research on the carbon dioxide assimilation in plants”

Melvin Calvin was born April 8^th, 1911 in St. Paul, Minnesota. Calvin earned his Bachelor of Science from the Michigan College of Mining and Technology in 1931 and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Minnesota in 1935. After four years of post-doctoral work at the University of Manchester, Melvin became a Professor in Chemistry at UC Berkeley in 1947. He teamed up with Andrew Benson and James Bassham in later years and together they mapped out the complete route that carbon travels through a plant during photosynthesis. They also discovered that sunlight acts on chlorophyll and not carbon dioxide as was believed before. In doing this, Calvin was the sole recipient of the 1961 Noble Prize for Chemistry. Melvin passed away January 8^th, 1997 at the age of 85.

Owen Chamberlain (IH 1940-41)
Recipient of the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physics with Emilio Gino Segre for “their discovery of the antiproton”

Owen Chamberlain was born July 10^th, 1920 in San Francisco. He studied physics at Dartmouth College and at the University of California, Berkeley. He remained in school until the start of World War II, and joined the Manhattan Project in 1942, where he worked with Segrè. In 1946, after the war, Chamberlain continued with his doctoral studies at the University of Chicago under legendary physicist Enrico Fermi. Chamberlain officially received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1949. In 1948, having completed his experimental work, Chamberlain returned to Berkeley as a member of its faculty, where he, Segrè, and other physicists investigated proton-proton scattering. In 1955, a series of proton scattering experiments at Berkeley's Bevatron led to the discovery of the anti-proton, a particle exactly like a proton except negatively charged. Chamberlain was also politically active on issues of peace and social justice, and outspoken against the Vietnam War. He was a member of Scientists for Sakharov, Orlov, and Shcharansky, three physicists of the former Soviet Union imprisoned for their political beliefs. He died of complications from Parkinson's disease in Berkeley at the age of 85.

Willis Lamb (IH 1931-38)
Recipient of the 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum,” shared with Polykarp Kusch

Willis Lamb was born July 12th, 1913 in Los Angeles, California. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from UC Berkeley in 1935. For theoretical work on scattering of neutrons by a crystal, guided by J. Robert Oppenheimer, he received the Ph.D. in physics in 1938. Lamb worked on nuclear theory, laser physics, and verifying quantum mechanics. Lamb was the Wykeham Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford from 1956 to 1962, and also taught at Yale, Columbia, Stanford and the University of Arizona. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1955 "for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum." Lamb died on May 15, 2008, at the age of 94,[2] due to complications of a gallstone disorder.

Abdul Majid (IH 1934-40)

Ambassador of Afghanistan to U.S.

Dr. Majid studied at Berkeley in the 1930s and received his B.A. in 1936 in Bacteriology. He later earned his Ph.D. in 1940 in Microbiology from the School of Public Health. In 1961, Dr. Majid was appointed Ambassador of Afghanistan. During his time as ambassador, he strove to strengthen relations between Afghanistan and the United States and corresponded with U.S. President John F. Kennedy regarding this matter. Abdul Majid was the first recipient of the Elise and Walter A. Haas International Award in 1966, which honors Berkeley alum from countries other than the United States who have made significant contributions to their country.

Ali Abdullah Alireza (IH 1941)
Abbassador of Saudi Arabia to the U.S.

Ali Abdullah Alireza was born in 1922 in Saudi Arabia. He met his wife, Marianne Likowski, while studying in Berkeley and living at the International House. She later wrote a memoir about their romance, entitled At the Drop of a Veil. They were married in 1943 and had five children together. He served as the ambassador of Saudi Arabia to the U.S. from 1975 to 1979 before passing away in 1984 at the age of 61

Andres Petricevic (IH 1963-72)
Bolivian Cabinet Member and Ambassador to the U.S.

Andres Petricevic studied at Berkeley to receive his M.S. in Civil Engineering.
He served as ambassador to the United States and as a member of the Bolivian cabinet throughout the 1990s.

Andrew Young (IH 1983-85)
U.S. Ambassador to Burkina Faso

Andrew Young, a career member of the Senior Foreign Service, was confirmed by the Senate on September 28, 2016 as the next U.S. Ambassador to Burkina Faso. Prior to this appointment, Mr. Young served as Deputy Chief of Mission at U.S. Embassy Bamako, Mali, where the Embassy’s inter-agency team addressed a wide range of challenges including securing a 2015 Peace Accord, confronting multiple terrorist attacks and successfully countering Ebola outbreaks. On November 16, 2016 Andrew Young received the James A. Baker Award for Outstanding Deputy Chief of Mission.
Previously, Mr. Young served as Spokesperson at U.S. Embassy Seoul, Korea (2010-2013), Political Counselor at U.S. Embassy Paris, France (2007-2010), and Desk Officer for Italy in the Bureau of European Affairs at the Department of State (2005-2007). He also served as Foreign Policy Advisor to Senator Joe Lieberman (2004-2005), Senior Watch Officer in the Department’s Operations Center (2003-2004), and Deputy Principal Officer at U.S. Consulate Auckland, New Zealand (2000-2003). Mr. Young served as Political Officer at U.S. Embassy Rangoon, Burma (1997-2000), Political Economic Section Chief at U.S. Consulate General Bombay, India (1995-1997), and India and Bhutan Desk Officer in the Bureau of South Asian Affairs at the Department of State (1993-1995). He began his Foreign Service career in 1991 as Consular Officer at U.S. Consulate General Hong Kong. Prior to joining the State Department, Mr. Young served as a Presidential Management Fellow at the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the United States Department of Commerce.
Mr. Young earned an A.B. from the University of California Berkeley (ΦΒΚ) and an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Bologna, Italy and Washington, D.C. In 2015, he received the American Foreign Service Association’s first Mark Palmer Award for the Advancement of Democracy for his work in Burma, on Capitol Hill and in Mali to promote democracy.

Haraldur Kroyer (IH 1941-42)
Ambassador of Iceland to the U.S.

Haraldur Kroyer came to Berkeley from Akureyri, Iceland to study International Relations. His thesis, “The union of Denmark and Iceland, 1918” was published in 1944. He was honored with the Elise and Walter A. Haas Award in 1976, which serves to honor alum of the University of California, Berkeley from countries other than the United States who have made significant contributions to their country.
Kroyer was able to attend Berkeley thanks to an Icelandic government scholarship and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. His distinguished career as a diplomat and statesman in his country’s service led to his position in which he also held credentials to Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Peru.

Irving Tragen (IH 1943-47)
Diplomat and 2010 Citation Award Winner

A California native, Irving received both his bachelor's and law degrees from UC Berkeley, along the way meeting his beloved wife, Ele, at the International House on campus. They married in 1947 and Irving and Ele immediately embarked on the first leg what would become a life-long journey to serve the forgotten populations of Mexico, El Salvador, Chile, Venezuela, Bolivia, Panama, Guatemala and the Caribbean.
From his years of service in undeveloped nations, Irving is resolute in his belief that "education is the key to the advancement of any population." He says, "My heart is with the California public university system. I owe my whole career to UC Berkeley and I would rather support the University of California than any other single institution." After decades of foreign travel and postings with Irving's work as a Foreign Service officer-including time as a labor attaché for the State Department, Director of United States policy for Argentina, Uruguay and Panama, and Department Director for the Organization of American States-Irving and Ele retired to La Jolla.

Joan Plaisted (IH 1966)
U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of the Marshall Islands

Joan Plaisted was born August 29th, 1945 in St. Peter Minnesota. She earned her B.A in International Relations and M.A. in Asian Studies from the School of International Service at American University in Washington, D.C., in 1967, as well as graduating from the University of Grenoble in 1967. Prior to joining the U.S. Foreign Service, she started her career with the Department of Commerce working on Japan, Korea and the Pacific Islands. She joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1973 and served as Office Director for Thailand and Burmese Affairs in the Department of State. From 1991 to 1994, she was Chargé d'affaires ad interim and Deputy Chief of Mission of the American Embassy in Rabat, Morocco. She also worked in Hong Kong and Paris. In Washington, Plaisted served in the Office of Chinese Affairs. She also served with the Executive Office of the President Office of the U.S. Trade Representative in Geneva, Switzerland. On July 26, 1995, President Bill Clinton announced his intention to nominate Joan Plaisted as Ambassador the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the Republic of Kiribati. She was appointed on December 19, 1995, and served until her retirement on July 28, 2000. She became a United States Senior Advisor to the United Nations some time later, and remains politically active.

Joao Baptista Pinheiro
Ambassador of Brazil to the U.S.

Ambassador Pinheiro holds a Brazilian law degree and a Masters in Economic~ from the University of California at Berkeley. His early diplomatic assignments included tours as Consul in San Francisco (1945 to 1949) and Second Secretary at the Brazilian Embassy in Washington (1949 to 1951). The Ambassador served as Director of the Brazilian Economic Development Bank from 1957 through 1961, and he has held previous ambassadorial appointments to Mexico, the Federal Republic of Germany and Argentina. His past associations with United States officials have been cordial and cooperative, and he has been characterized as very capable and completely honest. A career diplomat and economist, Pinheiro has been a major negotiator of Brazil’s economic relations with the U.S., Europe and Japan. Pinheiro, who received his master’s degree in economics in 1948 from UC Berkeley, accepted the Haas Award on April 5, 1979.

John Kenneth Galbraith (IH 1931-32)
Professor of Economics at Harvard, author and U.S. Ambassador to India

John Kenneth “Ken” Galbraith was born October 15th, 1908 in Ontario, Canada. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture from the Ontario Agricultural College in 1931, and was awarded a Giannini Scholarship in Agricultural Economics (60$ per month). This allowed him to travel to Berkeley, California where he received a Master of Science and Ph.D. in agricultural economics from UC Berkeley. In 1934, after graduating, he worked as a professor at Harvard University up until 1939. In 1939, he taught at Princeton University up until 1940. In February of 1946, Galbraith went to go work for a senior position in the State Department as director of the Office of Economic Security Policy where he was in charge of economic affairs regarding Germany, Japan, Austria, and South Korea. He was also an adviser to President John F. Kennedy. John was appointed United States Ambassador to India from 1961-63 and during his time as an ambassador, became a confidant of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. While in India, he helped establish one of the first computer science departments, at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh. Galbraith passed away April 29th, 2006 at the age of 97.

Kenneth Taylor (IH 1957-59) 
Ambassador of Canada to Iran

With extensive international business experience, Ken began his career in the Canadian Foreign Service and held senior diplomatic positions around the world in a 25-year career. In 1979, while serving as the Canadian Ambassador in Iran, he helped six Americans escape from Iran during the hostage crisis—his heroic story is portrayed in the 2012 movie Argo. In addition to numerous awards and honorary doctorate degrees, Ken’s civilian honors include the United States Congressional Gold Medal and the Official Order of Canada. Ken and his wife Dr. Patricia E. Taylor (IH 1958-60) were honored at the 2013 Gala as I-House Alumni Couple of the Year in recognition of their heroism during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, decades of championing the values of International House in their personal and professional lives, and longstanding support of International Houses, Berkeley and New York.

Martin Brennan (I-House Executive Director 2007-2012)
Former U.S. Ambassador to Uganda and Zambia, Interim U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria

Mr. Brennan is a native Californian, born and raised in the San Francisco Bay area. He is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service, Class of Minister Counselor. Mr. Brennan joined the Foreign Service in 1976 as a Political Officer and has served in Rwanda, Burkina Faso, Taiwan, Portugal, Thailand, Ethiopia, and Uganda. In his overseas assignments, he carried out responsibilities in the political, commercial, labor, consular, refugee, and public affairs fields. His refugee duties took him to Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos. He served on detail to the World Affairs Council of Northern California as Director of Programs. As Acting Director in the Office of Southern African Affairs in the State Department, he was active in the Angolan and Mozambican peace processes. Between 1999 and 2002, Mr. Brennan served as Ambassador to Uganda. He is the recipient of two Department of State Superior Honor and five Meritorious Honor awards. In 2003, he received a Senior Foreign Service Performance Pay Award. Mr. Brennan holds a Master’s degree from The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (1976) and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley (1971). He is fluent in French, Italian, and Portuguese and reasonably fluent in Mandarin Chinese.

Michael Okeyo
Ambassador of Kenya to the U.S.

Michael George Okeyo was born on 27th July 1939. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he graduated with a B.A. in Political Science and Economics in 1967 and an M.A. in Public Administration and Economics in 1968. In 1968 Michael came back to Kenya and was appointed Assistant Secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1969 the Kenya Government sponsored him for Diplomatic Training at the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, Uppsala, Sweden. In 1969 Michael was appointed to the Kenya Embassy in Cairo, Egypt. Michael proved to be a consummate diplomat and his efforts were recognized when he was promoted from 3rd Secretary to 2nd Secretary within a relatively short period. In 1974 Michael was appointed Kenyan Delegate to the United Nations in New York. And during his tenure between 1974 and 1984, he was elected, and continuously re-elected, to various leadership roles in the running of the affairs of the United Nations. Key among these include: —-Committee for Program and Coordination (CPC)-Vice Chairman and later Chairman- United Nations Joint Staff Pension Committee – Member- United Nations Joint Staff Pension Board – Member, and later Chairman – United Nations Committee on Conferences – Chairman. Michael proved to be a consummate diplomat and in recognition of this, in 1988 the Kenya Government appointed him Ambassador of Kenya to the United Nations, a position he held up to 1991. As a diplomat and Ambassador, Michael made a great impact at the United Nations. The Kenya Government recalled him back home in 1991 after which he was appointed Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources and later in 1993 moved to be P.S. Ministry of Labour and Manpower. Ambassador Michael retired from public service in 1993. He passed away in 2011 from cancer.

Robert C.F. Gordon (IH 1939-48)
U.S. Ambassador to Mauritius

Robert C. F. Gordon (March 19, 1920 – June 12, 2001) was an American diplomat, appointed as U.S. Ambassador to Mauritius. He graduated with a B.A. in 1941 and an M.A. (1949) from the University of California at Berkeley.  From 1941 to 1946, Gordon was with the Bethlehem Steel Corp., and from 1946 to 1948, he was with Tri-Metals Corp. He joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1950 and served as a foreign affairs analyst at the U.S. State Department and then as a political officer in Baghdad and Khartoum.  In 1961 to 1963, he was a personnel officer at the State Department, and he attended the National War College from 1963 to 1964. From then on until 1965, he was Deputy Chief of Mission in Dar es Salaam.  From 1965 to 1970, Gordon was the counselor for political-military affairs in Rome. He then was a special assistant for welfare and grievances at the State Department from 1970 to 1972. From 1972 to 1978, he was the consul general in Florence.  Gordon was appointed by Jimmy Carter to be United States Ambassador to Mauritius in 1980. He would replace Samuel Rhea Gammon III, who resigned. He was a coordinator for the handicapped at the State Department from 1978-1980.

Theogene Rudasingwa (IH 2005-2006)
Ambassador to the U.S. for the Republic of Rwanda and VP of Global Affairs at the Pangaea Global AIDS Foundation

Dr. Theogene Rudasingwa is a former Chief of Staff to Rwandan President Paul Kagame (2000-2004), former General Secretary of the Rwandan ruling party, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), and former ambassador to the United States from 1996 to 1999. Rudasingwa has been in exile in the U.S. since 2004 after falling out with President Kagame.

Abdelkader Abbadi (IH 1963-67)
U.N. Deputy Director for Political Affairs

Abdelkader Abbadi is a long-time participant in international affairs, working for the thirty years as a staff member at the United Nations Secretariat, and as a journalist for many publications, including Jeune Afrique. At five, he and the other fun-loving boys of his village were told by the French authorities that they must attend school. With an illiterate mother and a father who could barely read but not write, young Kader found school to be a strange activity. His parents supported him fully, and this was the beginning of his education, which culminated twenty-five years later with a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California at Berkeley. The recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship in 1958, Abbadi is a shining example of the program’s mandate to foster international peace and cooperation through education. At the International House at Berkeley and at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York, Abbadi has worked with others from many other countries, always with the goal of world peace. Married to a woman of Dutch descent, Abbadi today speaks four languages at home to his three children and eight grandchildren. At work, as a journalist, international staff and diplomat, he is fluent in French, Arabic, Spanish and English. He has learned how to greet the Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in his native Korean. Today, Abbadi divides his time between New York City, where he reports on North African affairs and international matters, and Hillsdale, New York where he and his wife raise apples, pears, cherries and quinces in an orchard in the Berkshire Mountains that remind him of the Atlas range at home in Morocco.

Jan Egeland (IH 1983)
U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs

Jan Egeland was born September 12th, 1957 in Stavanger, Norway. Egeland holds a mag.art. (Ph.D.) in Political Science from the University of Oslo. He has been a Fulbright Scholar at UC Berkeley and a fellow at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Egeland assumed his post as the Under-Secretary-General (USG) for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator (ERC) in August 2003. This position is the head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). He was preceded in the post by Kenzo Oshima of Japan. Egeland was also the Secretary General of the Norwegian Red Cross from 1999 to 2002 and State Secretary in the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1990 to 1997. He has also been Chair of Amnesty International in Norway, and Vice-Chair of the International Executive Committee of Amnesty International, which he was elected on to at the age of 23, the youngest ever to hold the position.

Sadako Nakamura Ogata (IH 1956-57) I-House Alumna of the Year 1992
U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees

Sadako Nakamura Ogata is a Japanese academic, diplomat, author, administrator, and professor emeritus at Sophia University. She was awarded a PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1963, after she completed a dissertation on the politics behind the foundation of Manchukuo. She is widely known as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) from 1991 to 2000, as well as in her capacities as Chair of the UNICEF Executive Board from 1978 to 1979 and as President of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) from 2003 to 2012. She currently serves as Advisor of the Executive Committee of the Japan Model United Nations (JMUN). 

Takehiro Nakamura (IH 1990-92)
Senior Programme Officer, United Nations Environment Programme

Takehiro Nakamura has been with UN Environment since 1992. He is Coordinator of the Marine and Coastal Ecosystems Unit in the Division of Environmental Policy Implementation. Since 2010 he has been engaged in the development and oversight of activities to support the development of tools and methodologies for the sustainable management and use of coastal and marine resources and ecosystem services. He has also been involved in the management of transboundary water systems (shared marine and coastal environment, shared river/lake basins, and shared groundwater systems) particularly through projects funded by the Global Environment Facility. He has also started a process of incorporating the ecosystem approach in the Regional Seas programme (coordinated by UN Environment). He has been engaged, among others, in the assessment of ecosystem conditions in river/lake basins for water management purposes, addressing water-related emergencies, setting up institutional mechanisms for shared river basins and the marine environment. He has Bachelor and Master of Engineering degrees from Kyoto University (1985 and 1987 respectively). In 1991 he gained a Master of Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and in 2007 a Ph.D. in Global Environmental Studies from Kyoto University, with a thesis on the ecosystem approach to river basin management.

Adriana Ginaturco (IH 1960-61)
Director of the California Department of Transportation and early champion of mass transit and carpool lanes

She was the director of Caltrans from 1976 to 1983, the first woman to serve in that role. (Just this month Laurie Berman started her tenure as the director of Caltrans.) An urban planner by trade, known for her affinity for using ice-plants as ground cover along highways, Gianturco advocated for policies that were controversial for their time - prioritizing transit and carpool lanes - which are more widely accepted today. Much of her time at Caltrans was shaped by the fiscal crises of the 1970s, advocating for maintenance rather than new construction. Another one of her legacies could be the halt of new freeway construction in California, but that is probably also more likely a result of the state's financial situation than anything else.

"One of the high points of my life was my year at I House in l960-196l!"

Oona King (IH 1989-90) I-House Alumna of the Year 2019
Member of Parliament, U.K.

Oona King was born October 22nd, 1967 in Sheffield, West Riding of Yorkshire. At the beginning of her period as an undergraduate at the University of York she was briefly a member of the Socialist Workers Party. During her second year (1988–89) she gained a scholarship to the University of California, Berkeley and graduated with a first-class honors Politics degree in 1990. Before becoming a member of parliament, King was a researcher for the European Parliament's Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee and worked as a political assistant to Glyn Ford MEP, the Labour Party Leader in the European Parliament, and later Glenys Kinnock MEP. In 1995–97, she was a political organizer for the GMB Southern Region. Winning the seat in 1997, King became only the second black woman to be elected as a member of parliament, the first being Diane Abbott. In her "truly first-class maiden speech", she emphasized a need for coherence in the strategy for eradicating poverty and the role of education in its elimination. King was also a passionate advocate of international aid and human rights. She served on the international development select committee, and she served as the Vice-Chair of the All-Parliamentary Group on Bangladesh. She was selected to second the Queen's Speech debate on November 2002, where she also discussed her views on genocide and a visit to Rwanda. In 2016, King took a leave of absence from the Lords to take a role as YouTube Diversity Director.

Cho Soon (IH 1960-61)
Prime Minister of the Republic of Korea and Mayor of Seoul

Dr. Cho received his Ph.D. from the University of California in 1967. He then had a distinguished academic career serving as both Dean and Professor of Economics at Seoul National University. Dr. Cho then served as the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Economic Planning Board of the Republic of Korea and held the position of Governor of the Bank of Korea. He became the first elected of mayor of Seoul in 1996. At Berkeley, his dissertation dealt with public finance. He was interested in monetary theory as well as economic development for developing countries including Korea. His time at Berkeley was marked by the Free Speech Movement, which he credits as influencing his thinking about democracy and freedom.  Cho served as Deputy Prime Minster of the Sixth Republic of Korea from February 28, 1988 to December 5, 1988. He served on the Economic Planning Board during this time. 

Elsie Gardner Ricklefs (IH 1938-39) 
Chair of the Hoopa Tribe of California

Elsie Mae Gardner Ricklefs was a Native American student who was accepted to UC Berkeley in 1938. She was blinded by a tumorous growth in her brain, which resulted in academic deficiencies, leading to her dismissal. Nineteen years later, after working at remote elementary schools in underserved areas and heading the Hoopa Indian Tribal Council, Ricklefs decided to seek readmission into UC Berkeley to renew her teaching certification from Humboldt State University. 

Emil Salim (IH 1962)
Minister of Indonesia and Professor of Economics at the University of Indonesia

Emil Salim) is an Indonesian economist and former politician. Salim graduated from the Faculty of Economics of the University of Indonesia in 1959. He obtained a PhD in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and returned to Indonesia to a teaching position at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Indonesia in 1964. He became one of the well-known group of 'Berkeley Mafia' economic advisers, working closely with Professor Widjojo Nitisastro. In 1977 he was appointed to the position of professor of economic development at the University of Indonesia.

Salim has held a number of government positions, including:

1966: member of the team of economic advisers to President Suharto
1967-68: member of the team of advisers to the Minister of Manpower.
1967-1969: Chairman of the technical team of the Council for Economic Stability and a member of the Gotong Royong Parliament.
1969: Vice Chairman of Bappenas (the National Development Planning Agency)
1971: Minister of State for the Improvement of the State Apparatus.
1973-1978: Minister of Transportation
1978-1983: Minister of State for Development Supervision and the Environment
1983-1993: Minister of State for Population and the Environment
2007-2010: Member of the Advisory Council to President Yudhoyono, as the adviser for environment and sustainable development issues
2010-2014: Chairperson, The Advisory Council to President Yudhoyono
Salim has chaired the Foundation for Sustainable Development and the Kehati Foundation, and co-chaired the United States-Indonesia Society. He is a member of the Association of Indonesian Moslem Intellectuals.

James C. Y. Soong
Chairman of the People First Party (PFP), Taiwan, Province of China

James Soong Chu-yu is a Taiwanese politician. He founded and chairs the People First Party, a smaller party in the Kuomintang (KMT)-led Pan-Blue Coalition. Born to a Kuomintang military family of Hunanese origin, Soong began his political career as a Secretary to Premier Chiang Ching-kuo (later President) and rose to prominence as Director-General of the Government Information Office from 1979 to 1984. Upon Chiang's death Soong was instrumental in silencing conservatives in the KMT from blocking the ascendancy of Lee Teng-hui as KMT leader. Soong was the only elected governor of Taiwan Province from 1994 to 1998, before the streamlining of the provincial government. He placed second in the 2000 presidential election; his independent candidacy split the pro-Chinese reunification vote between himself and the KMT candidate Lien Chan leading to the ascendancy of Democratic Progressive Party candidate Chen Shui-bian. In the 2004 presidential election, he ran as vice president on the ticket of KMT chairman Lien Chan; they narrowly lost to Chen Shui-bian. Soong ran again as a candidate in the 2012 presidential race, garnering 2.77% of popular support. Soong's third presidential campaign in 2016 formed a split ticket with Minkuotang chair Hsu Hsin-ying and won 12.84% of the vote.

W. Michael Blumenthal (IH 1947–49)
Secretary of the Treasury, U.S. First I-House alum to be honored at a Gala Celebration

"My time at I-House was one of the most richly rewarding experiences of my life."

Jerry Brown (IH 1960-61)
Governor of California, Former Mayor of Oakland and Attorney General of California

Jerry Brown is an American politician who served as the 34th and 39th Governor of California from 1975 to 1983 and from 2011 to 2019. A member of the Democratic Party, Brown served as California Attorney General from 2007 to 2011. He was both the oldest and sixth-youngest Governor of California as a consequence of the 28-year gap between his second and third terms. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley and Yale University, he began his political career as a member of the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees (1969–1971). He was elected to serve as the 23rd Secretary of State of California from 1971 to 1975. At 36, Brown was elected to his first term as Governor of California in 1974, making him the youngest California Governor in 111 years. In 1978, he won his second term. During and following his first governorship, Brown ran as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976, 1980 and 1992. He declined to pursue a third term in 1982, instead making an unsuccessful run for the United States Senate that same year. After traveling abroad, he returned to California and served as Chairman of the California Democratic Party (1989–1991), attempting to run for the Senate once more in 1992. After six years out of politics, Brown returned to public life, serving as Mayor of Oakland (1999–2007), then as Attorney General of California (2007–2011). He ran for his third and fourth terms as California Governor in 2010 and 2014. On October 7, 2013, he became the longest-serving chief executive in the history of California, surpassing Earl Warren.

Jeymoon Chung (IH 1955-56)
National Assemblyman and Chair of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Republic of Korea

Jeymoon Chung is a member of the Korean National Assembly and a Chair of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Republic of Korea. He works with others on the National Assembly to open a dialogue channel with North Korea on various matters pertaining to legislation. He also regularly attends twice-annual meetings of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, a regular gathering of the world’s lawmakers and focuses on relations between North and South Korea. 

Laura Castillo Sena de Gurfinkel (IH 1958-62)
Minister of Education of Venezuela

Dr. Castillo de Gurfinkel is known as one of the 14 pioneers who are credited with introducing the teaching of natural sciences in the Venezuelan secondary education subsystem. Her work, “Humberto Garcia Arocha (1912 – 1995),” reveals the implications of decree No. 321 promulgated by Romulo Betancourt as president of the Government Revolutionary Board. In her work, she comments favorably on this decree regarding the introduction of teaching with scientific character and rigor within the Venezuelan educational system.  Dr. Castillo de Gurfinkel pushed for a profound change in the methodology of evaluation and the requirements that the State should make to educational institutions in order to provide a quality education.

Laura Zegna (IH 1970s)
Chair of Italy's Special Olympics Organizing Committee

Laura Zegna, the granddaughter of fashion designer Ermenegildo Zegna, is known for carrying on her family’s generous philanthropy. Most notably, she has been involved with the Special Olympics in Italy, having served on the Organizing Committee. Some of her other charitable involvements include serving as Director of Oasi Zegna, a nature area in Piedmont, Italy that was founded by her grandfather in 1993. The project Oasi Zegna aims to develop the environmental education, especially for young people. Since its creation, the Oasi Zegna has cooperated with international organizations like TEMA, a Turkish organisation against desertification, WWF in China, RFA (Rain Forest Alliance), MGF (Moanalua Garden Foundation), AOC (American Ocean Campaign) and EMA (Environmental Media Association) in United States.

Marcos Espinal
Director of the Department of Communicable Diseases and Health Analysis at the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO)

Dr. Espinal, a national of the Dominican Republic, holds a medical degree from the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic (1985. He obtained a master's degree in public health (1990) and a doctorate in public health (1995) from the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health. Dr. Espinal's work experience includes positions in the Ministry of Health of the Dominican Republic and the National Center for Research on Maternal and Child Health; the New York City Public Health Department; and the WHO. Before joining PAHO, Dr. Espinal served as Executive Secretary of the WHO Stop TB Partnership, a global movement aiming at the elimination of TB as a public health problem. Dr. Espinal has published more than 100 publications in the field of communicable diseases and is a recipient of the Scientific Prize of the International Union against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, the Albert and Mildred Krueger Memorial Fellowship, and a graduate scholarship from the John E. Fogarty International Center. In 2008, Dr. Espinal was awarded the Walter and Elise A. Hass International Award by the University of California at Berkeley for a distinguished record of service in international health; and in 2012, he was awarded the Princess Chichibu Memorial TB Global Award by the Japan Anti-Tuberculosis Association.

Martin Rosen (IH 1953-55)
Co-founder and President of the Trust for Public Land

Martin Rosen was president of the Trust for Public Land from 1978-1997. He was a founding member of The Trust for Public Land's Board of Directors in 1972 and has served as chairman of the board. He was counsel to the San Francisco law firm of Silver, Rosen, Fischer & Stecher, which specialized in transportation and regulatory law. Mr. Rosen was part of a goodwill delegation to India under the auspices of the U.S. State Department and the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. He serves on the boards of the Pollinator Partnership, the Landscape Architecture Foundation, and other nonprofit and educational institutions. Previously, he was in residence as a Conservation Fellow, and taught at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, publishing a monograph entitled "Using Partnerships For Land Conservation." He is a member at-large of Earth Share's Board of Directors.

Mauricio Cárdenas Santamaría (IH 1987)
Minister of Economic Development, Colombia

Mauricio Cárdenas Santamaría was the 69th Minister of Finance and Public Credit and former Minister of Mines and Energy of Colombia, serving in the administration of President Juan Manuel Santos Calderón. Prior to this, he was a Senior Fellow and Director of the Latin America Initiative at the Brookings Institution. For the Government of Colombia, he has also served as the 4th Minister of Economic Development, the 6th Minister of Transport, and former Director of the National Planning Department, and in the private sector has served as 11th and 9th Director of the Higher Education and Development Foundation (Fedesarrollo), as the 7th President Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA), as former President of Titularizadora Colombiana S.A., and as General Manager of Empresa de Energía de Bogotá S.A. ESP.

Milton Marks (IH 1949)
California State Assemblyman and Senator

Milton Marks, Jr.) was a California politician who served in the California State Assembly and California State Senate, as both a Republican and a Democrat, representing San Francisco for 38 years. Born in San Francisco, Marks attended the city's Alamo Grammar School and Galileo High School, where he participated in the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps. After graduating from Galileo as valedictorian of the class of 1937, Marks went on to earn an A.B. from Stanford University in 1941, where he had been part of the Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps. Marks went on to the UC Berkeley School of Law and was studying with a friend, future federal judge Milton Lewis Schwartz, at International House Berkeley during the attack on Pearl Harbor. Less than a month after the attack, Marks reported to Fort Ord as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Army. Serving in the Pacific Theater of Operations, including the Philippines Campaign (1944–45), he was the Assistant Defense Counsel for the Court of the Eighth United States Army during the Occupation of Japan. After completing his Army service as a Major, Marks returned to the UC Berkeley Law School but eventually transferred, graduating from San Francisco Law School in 1949.[3] Marks first ran unsuccessfully for the State Assembly in 1954 as a Republican. He was elected in 1958 as a Republican to the Assembly, serving until 1966, when he was named a city judge. When a vacancy occurred in a State Senate seat in 1967, he ran in and won the special election as a Republican, defeating Democrat Assemblyman John L. Burton, who was the younger brother of powerful Democratic Congressman Phil Burton, head of the San Francisco political machine. He served in the Senate as a Republican until 1988, when he won re-election as a Democrat. He won his last Senate term as a Democrat in 1992; term limits forced his retirement in 1996.

Ogbonnaya Onu (IH 1977-80)
Governor of Abia, Nigeria

Ogbonnaya Onu (born December 1, 1951) is a Nigerian politician, author and engineer. He was the first civilian governor of Abia state and the immediate past Minister of Science and Technology, Federal Republic of Nigeria. He studied at the University of Lagos and graduated with a first class degree in Chemical Engineering in 1976. He went for his doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley and obtained a PhD in Chemical engineering in 1980. Dr. Onu became a lecturer in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Port Harcourt, and later became the pioneer Head of the Department. He also served as the Acting Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and was also elected as a Member of the Governing Council of the University. Onu started his political career as an aspirant for a Senatorial seat in the old Imo State on the platform of the National Party of Nigeria (NPN). He contested for the position of Governor of Abia State in 1991 under the umbrella of the National Republican Convention and won. He was sworn in as the first Executive Governor of the State in January 1992. He was the first Chairman, Conference of Nigerian elected Governors. In 1999, he was the Presidential flag bearer for the All People's Party. He became the National Party Chairman of the All Nigerian People's Party 2010. In 2013, he his party (ANPP) successfully merged with the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), Democratic People's Party (DPP) and some members of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) to form the All Progressives Congress (APC). In November 2015, he was appointed Minister of Science and Technology by President Muhammadu Buhari.

Pete Wilson (IH 1960)
Governor of California

Peter Barton Wilson (born August 23, 1933) is an American attorney and politician. A Republican, he served as a United States Senator and the 36th Governor of California. Wilson graduated from the UC Berkeley School of Law after serving in the United States Marine Corps. He established a legal practice in San Diego and campaigned for Republicans such as Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater. Wilson won election to the California State Assembly in 1966 and became the Mayor of San Diego in 1971. He held that office until 1983, when he became a member of the United States Senate. He resigned from the Senate after winning the 1990 California gubernatorial election. He sought the presidential nomination in the 1996 Republican primaries but quickly dropped out of the race. Wilson retired from public office after serving two terms as governor. Since leaving office, he has worked for several businesses and has been affiliated with several other organizations. 

 Pyoung Hoon Kim (IH 1956-57 and 1991-92)
Senior Protocol Secretary to the President of the Republic of Korea

Pyoung Hoon Kim was born in Nonsan, Korea in 1933. He studied Political Science at Berkeley and received his B.A. in 1959. He then earned is M.A. from Columbia University in 1962 before going back to Korea.
As Senior Protocol Secretary to the President of the Republic of Korea during the 1980s, he served as an interpreter for the President during his visits to other nations.

Robey Lal (IH 1967-68)
International Air Transport Association (IATA) country manager for India

Robey Lal has over 39 years of industry and related experience in the aviation sector. Before his appointment at IATA, Lal has been a Member of Board of the Airports Authority of India (AAI), where his responsibilities included Operations. Prior to that he was Member of the Board responsible for Engineering and Planning at IAAI. Lal has also worked as an airport engineering and planning consultant in India and abroad. Presently, Lal is a member of prestigious Civil Aviation Committee and Logistics and Transport Committee of Confederation of Indian Industries (CII).

Sir Desmond Rea (IH 1966-67)
Chairman of the Northern Ireland Policing Board and professor at the University of Ulster

Rea has held numerous roles as an academic, businessman, and public servant; written 40 research articles and two books; and edited a quarterly economic review for one of Northern Ireland’s largest banks for 25 years. His most lauded success, as chairman of the Northern Ireland Policing Board, earned him the UK’s highest honor—a knighthood—in 2005. He returned to Queen’s University’s new business administration department in 1967 to lecture and earn a master’s in corporate finance and PhD in organizational behavior and human resource management. In 1985 Rea, by now heading University of Ulster’s business studies department, began taking public-sector posts in health, education, and local government. By 1996, Rea was chair of the Northern Ireland Labour Relations Agency. Rea was appointed to the Policing Board for four years and elected twice, ultimately spending more than eight years ensuring the police service carried out its daily duties while gradually transforming in line with the Independent Commission’s recommendations.

Sudarmo Martonagoro (IH 1950-52)
Foreign Minister of Indonesia

Sudarmo Martonagoro studied Economics at the University of California, Berkeley and received his B.A. in 1953. He then received his M.A. in Economics in 1955 with a thesis entitled “Postwar foreign investment in Indonesia.”

Venkataram Ramakrishna (IH 1954-55)
Director of the South East Asia Regional Bureau for the International Union for Health Promotion and Education

Dr. Venkataram Ramikrishna studied Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley where he earned his M.P.H. in 1955.

Vernon Elhers (IH 1956-58)
U.S. Representative of Michigan

Vernon James Ehlers (February 6, 1934 – August 15, 2017) was born in Pipestone, Minnesota and  attended Calvin College in Grand Rapids for three years before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned an undergraduate degree in physics and, in 1960, a Ph.D. in nuclear physics. He was an American physicist and politician who represented Michigan in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1993 victory until his retirement in 2011. A Republican, he also served eight years in the Michigan Senate and two in the Michigan House of Representatives. Ehlers was the first research physicist to be elected to Congress.

Tetsuo Kondo (IH 1954-55)
Minister of Labor, Japan

Tetsuo Kondo was a Japanese politician who served as Japan's Minister of Labor from 1991 until 1992. Kondo, who was from Yamagata Prefecture, began his career as an employee of the Japanese Ministry of Finance. Kondo, a member of the Liberal Democratic Party, served as a member of the House of Representatives of Japan for nine terms from 1972 until 1996. He also served as chief of the now defunct Economic Planning Agency during his career as a lawmaker. Kondo was appointed as labor minister within the administration of Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa from 1991 until 1992. He retired from active politics after a failed re-election bid in the 1996 general election. Tetsuo Kondo died in Tokyo of pancreatic cancer on March 4, 2010, at the age of 80.

Vincent Visco (IH 1968)
Minister of Finance, Italy

Vincenzo Alfonso Visco is an Italian politician and economist who has served as a government minister. He gained an MSc in Economics at the University of York in 1969 and was awarded an honorary degree in 2004. Visco was elected to the Parliament of Italy in 1983 for the Sinistra Indipendente group, joining the Democratic Party of the Left in 1991, the Democrats of the Left in 1998 and the Democratic Party in 2007. He served as Finance Minister for a few days in 1993 and then again from 1996 to 2000 and Treasury Minister from 2000 to 2001. He returned to government in 2006 as Vice-Minister of Economy, a role in which he courted controversy. He was accused of using his political influence to benefit Unipol in a bank takeover, although he was cleared of any illegal activity. He also hit the headlines in this role when he described the country's debt as "a disaster". One of his final acts in this role was to publish the tax details of every Italian citizen for 2005 in a move he described as 'an act of transparency, of democracy, similar to what happens elsewhere in the world'.

Widjojo Nitisastro
Professor of Economics, University of Indonesia

Widjojo Nitisastro (23 September 1927 – 9 March 2012) was an Indonesian economist. He was one of Indonesia's most well-known and respected economic policy-makers, both within Indonesia and overseas. Widjojo was born in Malang in East Java, and died in Jakarta, Indonesia, aged 84. Widjojo Nitisastro became a full professor of economics at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta at the age of 34 in 1962. In the late 1960s, after the fall of president Sukarno and the transition to the new government under president Suharto, he became one of Indonesia's most important economic policy-makers.
Widjojo Nitisastro held ministerial rank in successive Indonesian cabinets for most of the 1970s until 1983. He continued to be influential as one of president's most trusted advisers throughout the rest of the 1980s. He worked closely with the president until Suharto resigned from office in 1998.

Wissanu Krea-ngam (IH 1970)
Deputy Prime Minister of Thailand

Wissanu Krea-ngam (Thai: วิษณุ เครืองาม, RTGS: Witsanu Khruea-ngam, pronounced [wít.sā.núʔ kʰrɯ̄a̯.ŋāːm]; born 15 September 1951) is a Thai jurist, civil servant, and politician. He studied law at the Faculty of Law, Thammasat University, graduating with an honours degree, and was admitted to the barby the Thai Bar Association. He continued his studies in the United States, completing his Master of Laws (1974) and Doctor of Juridical Science (1976) from the University of California, Berkeley. Moreover, he completed a course at the National Defence College of Thailand. He was the secretary-general of the cabinet from 1993 to 2002 and deputy prime minister under Thaksin Shinawatra from 2002 to 2006. After the 2014 Thai coup d'état, he served as an advisor to the military junta (National Council for Peace and Order, NCPO) responsible for drafting the post-coup 2014 interim constitution. Since August 2014, he has again been deputy prime minister under General Prayut Chan-o-cha.

Haakon Magnus (IH 1997)
Crown Prince of Norway
I-House Alumnus of the Year 2009

Haakon, Crown Prince of Norway is the only son of King Harald V and Queen Sonja and heir apparent to the throne of Norway. Haakon has served in the Royal Norwegian Navy, where he undertook his first-level officer's education at the Norwegian Naval Academy. This was then followed with a year aboard missile torpedo boats and other vessels. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1999. Haakon later attended lectures at the University of Oslo and took the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs' civil servant introductory course in 2001. He completed his education in 2003 at the London School of Economics, where he was awarded an MSc in development studies, specializing in international trade and Africa.

He received the International House Alumnus of the Year award for his extensive humanitarian work as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations to promote the Millennium Development Goals. In his acceptance speech, Haakon cited how his I-House Experience had enriched him in many ways, both big and small, and contributed to the skills and perspectives of his diplomatic work around the world. Watch the video of the award ceremony(link is external) and read the article in the I-House Times Newsletter (PDF file). 

His Royal Highness, the Crown Prince of Norway, HaakonMagnus, returned to I-House in 2013 in conjunction with a Silicon Valley visit. For a decade, he has been a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Development Program and its UN 2015 Millennium Goals. Program goals include establishing cooperative relationships between the U.N. and the private sector to make the benefits of new technologies, especially information and communications, available worldwide. The Prince’s visit included a signing ceremony at UC Berkeley related to an international business agreement consistent with these aims. Additional goals include halving the numbers of people worldwide surviving on $1/day, promoting universal access to education, gender equality, safe water, HIV/malaria reductions, and sustainable development.

Laurent Benoit Baudouin (IH 1995-98)
Prince of Belgium

Prince Laurent of Belgium (born 19 October 1963) is the second son and youngest child of King Albert II and Queen Paola, and younger brother of King Philippe. Laurent's involvement with animal welfare and the environment, together with a relative lack of interest in protocol, has caused him to be dubbed by elements of the popular Belgian press as écolo-gaffeur (the eco-blunderer). Currently, he is 12th in the Belgian line of succession. He had been as high as third in line, but the constitution was amended in 1991 to extend an equal right of succession to women who descend from the dynasty's founder King Leopold I put him behind Princess Astrid and her descendants.

Andre Manoliu (IH 1974-76)
Managing Director, GrowthPlans, LLC

Andre Manoliu is the founder of GrowthPlans, which provides business and financial advice to emerging growth companies. He has practiced law for almost 20 years with the leading Silicon Valley firm of Cooley Godward LLP. He specializes in strategic negotiations, M&A and venture capital transactions. Dr. Manoliu serves on the board of several private and public companies. Dr. Manoliu holds a Ph. D. in Solid State Physics from the University of California, Berkeley, and a law degree from Stanford University, where he was elected to the Order of the Coif.

Arun Sarin (IH 1975-78)
CEO, Vodafone

Arun Sarin (born 21 October 1954) is an Indian-American telecommunications executive. Sarin was the former CEO of the telecom giant Vodafone Group plc, serving from 2003 until 2008. He was the driving force behind the Vodafone's strategic move into emerging markets, especially Asia and Africa, through the purchases of Turkish operator Telsim and a controlling stake in Hutchison Essar in India. He was a senior advisor at the private equity firm KKR. He also serves on the board of directors of Ola Cabs, Cisco Systems, Charles Schwab and Blackhawk Networks. Sarin received an honorary knighthood from the Queen at Buckingham Palace on 10 March 2010.

Charlene Wang Chien (IH 1972-74)
President, First International Computer, Inc., Taiwan, Province of China

Founded in 1980 by the husband and wife team of Ming Chien and Charlene Wang, First International Computer brought together two opposite sides of Taiwan's political and economic history. Chien's father, Ji Chien, had been a poor farmer in pre-war Taiwan who had become a political figure protesting the industrialization policies of the new Nationalist government that had fled to Taiwan from the communist mainland. Ji Chien was thrown in jail and later executed. Ming Chien, who never knew his father, went on to study at the University of California at Berkeley, ultimately receiving a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1975 and marrying classmate and fellow Taiwanese Charlene Wang. Wang's background could not have been more different from Chien's. Like many Taiwanese in the Cold War era, Charlene came to the United States to study in the 1970s, earning a master's degree in statistics in 1973. Following their marriage, Wang and Chien went to work for Rockwell International and Bell Labs, respectively, in order to gain first-hand international work experience before returning to Taiwan in the late 1970s.

Choong Kun Cho (IH 1955-58)
President, Korean Airlines

Choong Kun Cho was born in 1932 in Seoul, Republic of Korea. He earned a B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1959. In 1987, he was awarded an honorary Doctorate from Southwest Baptist University. Cho served as the Chief Secretary of the Hanjin Transportation Company from 1959-1961. He then was promoted to Vice President of the company, a role that he filled until 1968 when he became President of Air Korea. He has also served as a member on a special advising committee on transportation policies since 1982. Cho was a captain of the Korean Army from 1951-1955. He is also a member of the Korean Aeronautic Association, having served as a chairman since 1977. He has been a member of the Korea-Austria Economic Corporation Committee since 1978. Additionally, he was an honorary consul to the Kingdom of Morocco in 1980. He has also served as a vice chairman on the Korea-Japan Economic Association since 1989 and was on the Berkeley Foundation Board of Trustees. As a fan of tennis, Mr. Cho has served as a chairman on the Korea Tennis Association and the Asia Tennis Foundation since 1985 and 1987, respectively.

David Fischer (IH 1990-91)
Founder, Soho Hospitality India

David is an established leader in founding and managing global digital, media and hospitality businesses. Currently Founder of Soho Hospitality India, the JV partner for the Soho House Group in the Subcontinent, David was previously Chairman of digital agency Media Run Ltd, which he successfully sold in 2007. Earlier, he started MySpace’s international business and created Europe’s largest social network, concurrently serving as Executive VP of Fox Interactive where he built IGN into the UK’s #1 gaming portal. David is also co-founder and Chairman of the Xlantic Group, an award-winning digital media and music group. Prior senior executive experience at AOL, Universal Music and Turner Broadcasting.

 Eric Schmidt (IH 1976-80)
CEO, Google

Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American businessman and software engineer. He is known for being the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, Executive Chairman of Google from 2011 to 2015 and executive chairman of Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 2017. In 2017, Forbes ranked Schmidt as the 119th-richest person in the world, with an estimated wealth of US$11.1 billion. As an intern at Bell Labs, Schmidt did a complete re-write of Lex, a software program to generate lexical analysers for the UNIX computer operating system. From 1997 to 2001, he was Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Novell. From 2001 to 2011, Schmidt served as the CEO of Google. He has served on various other boards in academia and industry, including the Boards of Trustees for Carnegie Mellon University, Apple, Princeton University, and Mayo Clinic.

George H. B. Verberg (IH 1970-71)
President, International Gas Union

George H.B. Verberg was born on September 2, 1942 in Batavia (former Dutch East Indies). After primary school in Medan (Indonesia) and secondary school in the Netherlands, he read General Economics at the Netherlands School of Economics of the Erasmus University, Rotterdam, graduating with distinction in 1970. He spent 1970/1971 in the United States, studying at M.I.T. and the University of California at Berkeley. Mr. Verberg joined the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science in May 1971. In March 1974 he joined the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and held subsequently the positions of General Economic Policy Director, Director-General for Trade, Industry and Services and during 1982-1988 Director-General for Energy. Mr. Verberg joined N.V. Nederlandse Gasunie on January 1, 1988 and was appointed Commercial Managing Director with effect from January 1, 1989. From May 1992 till July 2004 he was Gasunie’s CEO. He also served two periods as President of EUROGAS. Mr. Verberg was appointed President of the International Gas Union on June 1, 2003 for the triennium 2003– 2006 and President of the World Gas Conference 2006 in Amsterdam. February 2007 – January 2009 he served as President of the Energy Delta Institute (EDI) in Groningen. EDI was founded in 2002 – a cooperative agreement between N.V. Nederlandse Gasunie, GasTerra, OAO Gazprom and Groningen University, joined by Shell in 2006 and by RWE in 2007. EDI aims to educate the energy industry’s current and future managers. Therefore EDI coordinates knowledge projects and organizes training programmes with a focus on economic, social, managerial and geopolitical aspects of the gas value chain.

Hamid Savoj (IH 1990-91)
Senior Vice President, Magma Design Automation

Hamid Savoj, a cofounder of Magma, joined the company in May 1997 as a Principal Engineer and has served as Vice President of Product Development since May 2000. From May 1994 to May 1997, Mr. Savoj was a senior member of the consulting staff at Cadence Design Systems, Inc. Mr. Savoj received a doctorate degree in computer aided design from the University of California, Berkeley and BS in Electrical Engineering from California Institute of Technology.

Hans Rausing (IH 1948-49)
Chairman, TetraPak

Sir Hans Rausing, KBE (born 25 March 1926) is a Swedish businessman based in the United Kingdom. He made his fortune from his co-inheritance of Tetra Pak, a company founded by his father Ruben Rausing and currently the largest food packaging company in the world. In 1995 he sold his share of the company to his brother, Gad. In the Forbes world fortune ranking, Rausing was placed at number 83 with an estimated fortune of $US10 billion in 2011. According to Forbes, he was the second richest Swedish billionaire in 2013. As of July 2016, Forbes reported his net worth as $12.5 billion. As of 17 May 2013, Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated Rausing's net worth to be $13.3 billion.

J. Dennis Bonney (IH 1954-55)
Vice Chairman, Chevron 

J. Dennis Bonney is a retired Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors of Chevron Corporation. As Vice Chairman, he was responsible for Chevron’s worldwide oil and gas exploration and production. Dennis also is a former director of Chicago Bridge and Iron N.V. and several other companies. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a former Trustee of the University of California’s International House. He was a former chairman of the World Affairs Council of Northern California. Dennis holds a master’s degree from Oxford University and Master of Laws from the University of California, Berkeley.

Jan Fandrianto (IH 1981)
President, Obihai Technology, Inc.

Jan Fandrianto, together with Sam Sin, introduced the first analog telephone adaptors as Komodo Technology in the 1990s and formed Sipura Technology in 2002. Both prior companies were acquired by Cisco Systems in 2000 and 2005, respectively. Fandrianto and Sin went on to form Obihai Technology in 2010, a manufacturer of analog telephone adaptors which support SIP (session initiation protocol), XMPP, and Google Voice compatible internet telephony.

Jawahar Gidwani (IH 1973-76)
Chairman and CEO, KARMA2GO, LLC

Founding Chairman and CEO of NeoKismet, L.L.C, a nano-electro-cells company, and karma2go, L.L.C., a company whose projects include a seismic retrofit study of the Golden Gate Bridge, Mr. Gidwani was a resident of I-House from 1973 to 1976 while studying engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. While at I-House, he served as Chair of the Resident Council and met his wife Catherina Paolino. A member of the I-House Board since 1993, Mr. Gidwani has served as Chair of the Executive Committee and Vice-President of the Board since 2000. International House was delighted to recognize him as 2004 Alumnus of the Year.

Kakutaro Kitashiro (IH 1970-71)
General Manager, IBM Asia Pacific

Kakutaro Kitashiro (Japanese: 北城恪太郎, April 21, 1944 - ) is a Japanese systems engineer and business executive. He was the president of IBM Japan, Ltd., IBM's Japanese subsidiary, in 1993-1999, and of IBM Asia Pacific Corporation in 1999-2003, and contributed to the development of the IT business in Japan and Asia-Pacific. He was also the chairperson of Japan Association of Corporate Executives in 2003-2006, and the chair of the Board of Trustees of International Christian University, Tokyo, in 2010-2019.

Kaya Tuncer (IH 1959-62)
Turkish-American mega-builder, entrepreneur and philanthropist

Kaya started his career as a structural engineer. As a construction executive for Bechtel in the 1970s and 80s, Kaya played a leading role in the development of the Saudi Arabian Industrial City of Jubail and the James Bay hydroelectric complex in Canada. In 2000, Kaya launched Space Camp Turkey. Kaya's vision to shape future leaders through space science education has resulted in over 100,000 participants from 55 countries. To foster cross-cultural understanding, Kaya and his wife Mary established Global Friendship Through Space Education, a California nonprofit.
In recognition of his philanthropic work, in 2004 Kaya became the first Turkish-American to receive the prestigious Ellis Island Medal of Honor.

Kazusue Konoike (IH 1973-82)
President, Konoike Construction Co., Ltd., Japan

Dr. Kazusue Konoike earned his M.S. in Civil Engineering in 1975. He returned to Japan and was appointed the managing director of Konoike Construction Co. in 1985. In 2003, he stepped down as president and chairman of the firm and became head of the board. He currently serves as one of the Vice Presidents and as an honorary chairman of the Japan British Society of the Kansai. 

 Leigh Steinberg (IH 1973-74)
Sports agent and sports attorney credited as the inspiration for the title character in Jerry McGuire

Leigh William Steinberg (born March 27, 1949) is an American sports agent. During his 41-year career, Steinberg has represented over 300 professional athletes in football, baseball, basketball, boxing, and Olympic sports. He has represented the No. 1 overall pick in the NFL draft a record eight times. Steinberg is often credited as the real-life inspiration of the sports agent from Cameron Crowe's film Jerry Maguire in 1996.

Moshe H. Alafi (IH 1949-50)
Director of Molecular Devices at BrainScope

As one of the first venture capitalists to see the potential in biotechnology, Alafi became a founder of the now multitrillion-dollar field. He has been an active investor for more than 25 years and was a seed investor in such pioneering companies as Cetus, Biogen, Applied Biosystems, and Amgen. Over the course of his career, he has founded more than 60 companies. Alafi currently serves as a director of molecular devices at BrainScope, which is developing a new generation of brain state assessment instruments based on patterns of brain electrical activity.

Paritosh Choksi (IH 1975-77)
Executive Vice President, ATEL Capital Group

Mr. Paritosh K. Choksi, graduated as a Mechanical Engineer from IIT Bombay in 1975 and earned his MBA degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1977. Mr. Choksi is currently the COO of ATEL Capital Group. Mr. Choksi was one of the first Indian entrepreneurs to make his company Phoenix American public in 1980 and was probably one of the youngest CXO of a listed company at that time. In 1984, Mr. Choksi created a financial instrument that is today a multi-billion dollars per year financial industry. It was the innovation of venture leasing and later venture debt. This tool has been used by thousands of startups to finance its growth without giving up equity in the process. It is debt with an equity kicker which gave these emerging companies minimal dilutive capital. Some of the early pre-I PO stage companies he helped finance were Yahoo and Netscape. He later went to finance this on Wall Street using Asset Backed Securitization. In 2008, he opened up the Islamic capital markets to invest in us equipment leasing to Fortune 1000 companies. His innovation created a vehicle whereby Islamic investors following the principal of Sharia laws invested in income generating equipment leased to companies such as Walmart, GE, Cargill and Bayer. This was the first financial advisory firm in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to lease equipment acceptable to Sharia laws and ljara.

Richard Goldman (IH 1941-42)
Founder of Goldman Insurance Services and the Goldman Environmental Prize, and the Cal Alumni Association's 2010 Alumnus of the Year

Richard N. Goldman (April 16, 1920 – November 29, 2010) was an American philanthropist who co-founded the Goldman Environmental Prize in 1990 with his wife, Rhoda Goldman. He founded the insurance company Goldman Insurance and Risk Management, and with his wife he established the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund in 1951. Richard and Rhoda Goldman established the Goldman Environmental Prize in San Francisco, California, in 1990. Goldman's foundation, which is sometimes nicknamed the "Green Nobel," awarded six prizes annually worth $150,000 USD to environmental activists representing six regions of the world. Approximately $13.2 million has been awarded to activists from more than 70 countries since the Goldmans established the award, as of 2010. . In addition to his work with the Goldman Environmental Prize, Goldman supported beautification projects in San Francisco, and co-founded the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund. Through his foundation, which is worth more than one billion dollars, Goldman funded projects throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, including the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco and the Rhoda Goldman Plaza. Among his California projects were investments in solar power, and protection of redwood forests and sealife. In 2004, he was awarded the Chairman's Medal in the 11th Annual Heinz Award. The Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley is named for the Goldmans.

"International House is a wonderful concept. It serves a valuable function here and in other cities where I-Houses are located."

Simon Lewis OBE (IH 1981-82)
CEO, Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME)

Simon Lewis OBE (born 8 May 1959) is the chief executive of the Association for Financial Markets in Europe. He was formerly Director of Communications for the former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown. He previously held this position for the Queen, Vodafone, and Centrica. He attended Whitefield School before studying PPE at Brasenose College, Oxford. Lewis was appointed an OBE in the 2014 New Year Honours List for public service and services to international education through the Fulbright Commission.

Dr. Jayanta Roy  (IH 1967-68)

Dr. Roy was an internationally respected trade economist who worked for the World Bank, for the Government of India and later, as an independent consultant, author and university professor. He graduated from St. Xavier’s Collegiate School, then received his Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Presidency College, Calcutta (1963) and his Master’s degree from the Delhi School of Economics (1966). In 1967, Dr. Roy came to Berkeley on a graduate fellowship, earning his Ph.D. in 1972. In his first year at Cal, he was a resident of International House. 

As a microeconomist, Dr. Roy specialized in International Trade, focusing on trade policies, export development, and trade facilitation. Dr. Roy was a key member of the Government of India team that proposed and oversaw the opening of the Indian economy in 1991. Later, he chaired the Trade Facilitation Group in the Ministry of Finance. At the World Bank, Dr. Roy was the lead economist for several countries, including Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Dr. Roy passed away in 2021.

Charles Ferguson (IH 1973)
Director and producer of the Academy Award-winning documentary Inside Job and the Academy Award-nominated No End In Sight: The American Occupation of Iraq. Charles Ferguson is International House's 2011 Alumnus of the Year.

A native of San Francisco, Ferguson was originally educated as a political scientist. A graduate of Lowell High School in 1972, he earned a BA in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1978, and obtained a PhD in Political Science from MIT in 1989. Ferguson then conducted postdoctoral research at MIT while also consulting to the White House, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the Department of Defense, and several U.S. and European high technology firms. From 1992–1994 Ferguson was an independent consultant, providing strategic consulting to the top managements of U.S. high technology firms including Apple Inc., Xerox, Motorola, and Texas Instruments. For more than 20 years, Ferguson had been intensely interested in film, and regularly attended film festivals such as the Telluride Film Festival for over a decade. In mid-2005, he formed Representational Pictures and began production of No End in Sight, which was one of the first feature-length documentaries on post-war Iraq.

Dietrich von Bothmer (IH 1940)
Curator of Greek and Roman Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City

Dietrich Felix von Bothmer (October 26, 1918 – October 12, 2009) was a German-born American art historian, who spent six decades as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he developed into the world's leading specialist in the field of ancient Greek vases.
Following the completion of his military service, Bothmer was hired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1946, and was named as a curator in 1959. By 1973, he was department chairman and he was named in 1990 as distinguished research curator. In 1972, together with the Director, Thomas Hoving, Bothmer argued in favor of the purchase of the Euphronios krater, a vase used to mix wine with water that dated from the sixth century BCE. They convinced the museum's board to purchase the artifact for $1 million, which the museum funded through the sale of its coin collection. The Government of Italy demanded the object's return, citing claims that the vase had been taken illegally from an ancient Etruscan site near Rome. The krater was one of 20 pieces that the museum sent back to Italy in 2008 in exchange for multi-year loans of ancient artifacts that were put on display at the Met, as part of an agreement reached in 2006. Bothmer took a faculty position in 1965 at the Institute of Fine Arts, the nation's top-ranked graduate program in art history, according to the National Research Council's 1994 study. He was the recipient of numerous awards and citations, including a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur. He was a member of the Académie française (one of only two Americans to have this honor), an honorary fellow of Wadham College, and the recipient ofseveral honorary doctorates. Complementing his career as a curator and an academic, he served on the Art Advisory Council of the International Foundation for Art Research.

Ermenegildo Zegna (IH 1970s)
Italian fashion designer

Founded in 1910 when Ermenegildo Zegna bought his father's textile looms, it is now managed by the fourth generation of the Zegna family and remains in family ownership. As well as producing men's suits for its own labels, it also manufactures suits for Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Dunhill and Tom Ford. As one of the biggest global producers of fine fabrics (2.3 million metres per year), Zegna has been active in promoting improvements in wool production around the world] Zegna is the largest menswear brand in the world by revenue. Alessandro Sartori oversees creative direction for all departments of the brand.

Tsheweng Dendup
Star of Travelers and Magicians, a film shot in Bhutan which explores the appeal of Western glamour versus traditional ways

Tshwang Dendup graduated from Berkeley in 2001 with a Masters of Journalism from the Graduate School of Journalism.
Besides appearing in a Bhutanese film, Tshewang Dendup has also worked as a journalist for the Bhutan Broadcasting Service Corporation first as a reporter and producer, then moving through the ranks as a news coordinator, head of radio, senior producer and eventually as manager of the News and Current Affairs Department. He then worked as the Executive Director of the Samdrup Jonghkar Initiative, Bhutan’s first major civil society-based development project designed to foster GNH-based development in harmony with government goals. Additionally, he has worked as an Assistant Director at Tsong Tsong Ma Productions and as an adjunct faculty member at Sherubtse College.

Wilton Dillon (IH 1949-50)
Senior Scholar Emeritus at the Smithsonian

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Dr. Dillon was research director and executive secretary of the Phelps-Stokes Fund, a New York-based philanthropic organization. His work took him to Ghana, the newly independent West African country where his only child was born. Dr. Dillon settled in Washington in 1963 to take over the African affairs section at the National Academy of Sciences. Six years later, he joined the Smithsonian as director of seminars, succeeding his friend Matthew Huxley, the epidemiologist and son of “Brave New World” author Aldous Huxley. Dr. Dillon’s role was to expand seminar offerings and book production, emulating world-class universities and their publishing arms. The symposia included commemorations of theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, founding father Thomas Jefferson, the Renaissance-era mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus and the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. In addition, Dr. Dillon raised money and served as a liaison to institutions of higher learning. He retired officially in 1994, soon after his division — by then renamed the Office of Interdisciplinary Studies — was abolished. At his death, he held the title of senior scholar emeritus.

Yoshi Akiba (IH 1973)
Founder of Yoshi's Jazz Club and Japanese Restaurant in the Bay Area

Yoshi’s began in 1972 as a small, North Berkeley sushi bar owned by founder and namesake, Yoshie Akiba, alongside her two best friends Kaz Kajimura, a journalist and carpenter, and Hiroyuki Hori, a painter and Japanese cook. Over the next 40 years, Yoshi’s built itself into one of the world’s most respected jazz venues, earning a reputation as the Bay Area’s premier location for great Japanese cuisine and jazz music. Today, Yoshi’s is an award-winning 310-seat live performance venue with a state-of-the-art sound system and design, occupying 17,000 square feet in the heart of Oakland’s Jack London Square. Under the guidance of current Artistic Director Daniel Grujic, the venue has expanded its focus to include broader genres suitable to a variety of musical tastes.

"Because of I-House I learned that my life would be about connecting with other people."

Yoshiko Kakudo (IH 1961-62)
Curator of Japanese Arts, de Young Museum of San Francisco

Born in Osaka, Japan, Yoshiko Kakudo received her B.A. in Sociology from Kobe College in 1957, and her M.A. in Decorative Art from UC Berkeley in 1964. While she was in Berkeley she resided in International House and was one of the notable Alumni. She joined the Avery Brundage Collection as a Research Assistant in 1964. At that time the Brundage Wing was not built yet and she worked in the basement of the old de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park. She became the Curator of Japanese Art in 1970 and held that position until her retirement in 1994. She also cared for the Korean Art Collection until 1989 when the museum hired the Curator of Korean Art. Besides her permanent Japanese galleries in the Asian Art Museum, Yoshiko was also responsible for the Japan Center Extension Gallery when the new Japan Center was established in Japan Town in 1972. For many years, Yoshiko selected objects from the Asian Art Museum and displayed them with impeccable taste in the small gallery over the Webster Street Bridge. Throughout her thirty years in the museum, Yoshiko Kakudo curated and co-curated more than thirty exhibitions, took part in numerous symposia, gave many lectures, and wrote many articles on the museum's Japanese collection and on the subject of Japanese Art.

A. Richard Newton (IH 1975-76)
Dean of the College of Engineering, UC Berkeley

Newton was educated at the University of Melbourne and received a BE in 1973 and MEng.Sci in 1975. He then went to Berkeley in 1975 to work on SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis), a program initially developed by Larry Nagel and Donald Pederson to analyse and design complex electronic circuitry with speed and accuracy. Berkeley awarded Newton a PhD in 1978 and unusually an Engineering Faculty position as well. He was appointed assistant professor in 1978, associate professor in 1982 and full professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences in 1985. He chaired the department from 1999 to 2000, and was dean of the College of Engineering and the Roy W. Carlson Professor of Engineering from 2000 until his death. He died at 55 due to pancreatic cancer at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center. 

"I developed many, many friendships while I lived at I-House. In many ways, it is the development of these deeper understandings and these deeper friendships with people from around the world that this House is really all about."

Alison Dundes Renteln (IH 1983)
Director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California, and author of The Cultural Defense

Alison Dundes Renteln (born January 9, 1960) is a Professor of Political Science, Anthropology, Law, and Public Policy at the University of Southern California. She holds a B.A. (History and Literature) from Harvard-Radcliffe, a J.D. from USC's Gould School of Law, and a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence & Social Policy from the University of California, Berkeley. She is also the author of The Cultural Defense (2004) which was first book-length study which provides a comprehensive overview of the debate surrounding the admissibility of cultural evidence in the courtroom. Renteln contends that the cultural defense should, in both criminal and civil matters, be given formal recognition.

Ashok Gadgil (IH 1973-75)
UC Berkeley Professor and Scientist, Energy Pioneer

Ashok Gadgil (born November 15, 1950 in India) Is Faculty Senior Scientist and was Director of the Energy and Environmental Technologies Division for 2010-2015 at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is also Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in heat transfer, fluid dynamics, and technology design for development. He also has substantial experience in technical, economic, and policy research on energy efficiency and its implementation - particularly in developing countries. Two of his best-known technologies for the developing-world are "UV Waterworks" (a simple, effective, and inexpensive water disinfection system), and the Berkeley-Darfur Stove (a low-cost stove that saves fuelwood in internally displaced person's camps in Darfur). In early 1990s, he analyzed the potential for large utility-sponsored projects to promote energy efficient electric lighting in poor households in developing countries, then teamed up with others to design and demonstrate such projects. These have become commonplace in dozens of developing countries since 2000 onward, saving billions of dollars annually to their economies.

Bora Özkök (IH 1964-70) 
Scholar of Turkish culture, folklore and music

Bora Özkök was born in Adana, Turkey. His interest in folk dance was rooted in his childhood, when his parents took him to watch folklore shows. At the age of fifteen, Bora was a member of the Turkish Olympic swim team in the Rome Olympics of 1960. Upon graduation, Bora continued at a private architectural school for a year. Then, in 1965, he came to the United States on an athletic scholarship granted by the University of California at Berkeley, where his major was in architecture.  In 1969, Bora was selected as one of the twelve outstanding foreign students in America, chosen from 1,000 Middle-Eastern nominees from 500 universities and colleges in the United States, and the outstanding representative of Turkey. He graduated from Berkeley in 1971 with a Bachelors Degree in Architecture. Bora began folk dancing at Berkeley in 1967, and learned his first Turkish dances during a visit to Turkey in 1970 from members of the Turkish National Folk Dance Ensemble. After his return that same year, he taught at the San Francisco Kolo Festival and the rest, as they say, is history.  Bora was not only an outstanding dancer and inspiring teacher, he was a talented musician, playing music for the dances he taught. In 1976, Bora arranged and accompanied the performing tour of FOTEM (Folk Training and Education Center of Istanbul) across the United States. 

Bryan Webber (IH 1969-73)
Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, and member of the Royal Society of London

Bryan Ronald Webber, FRS, is a British physicist and academic. He was a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge from 1973 to 2010, and Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge from 1999 to 2010. He has been awarded the Dirac Medal by the Institute of Physics and the Sakurai Prize by the American Physical Society. He studied at The Queen's College, Oxford and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in 1964. He then moved to California to undertake postgraduate research within the research group of Luis Walter Alvarez at the University of California, Berkeley. He completed his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in experimental particle physics in 1969. Webber began his academic career as a postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, California. There, he researched strong interaction under Geoffrey Chew from 1969 to 1971. He then returned to England where he joined the University of Cambridge as a research assistant. By 1973, he was appointed head of the Theoretical High Energy Physics Group at the Cavendish Laboratory. At university level, he was promoted to reader in 1994. He was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics in 1999. He retired in September 2010, and was appointed Professor Emeritus. On retirement in 2010, he was elected a Life Fellow of Emmanuel College. 

Choh-Ming Li (IH 1932)
Vice Chancellor, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Born in Canton, China in 1912, Choh-Ming Li was the third child and the eldest son in a family of 11 children. He earned his B.S. in commerce (1932), M.A. (1933) and Ph.D. in economics (1936) from the University of California, Berkeley. Li returned to China to teach economics at Nankai University in Tiensien in 1937. From 1938-1943, Li taught at the National Southwest Associated University (Lianda). Li was among the key economists to bring Western economic ideas into China, both in teaching and serving as China’s representative at various international missions. From 1945-47, Li was named Deputy Director-General of the Chinese National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (CNRRA)in Shanghai, to work with the United Nations (UNRRA) in managing the postwar relief and recovery effort in China. As the war ended, Li became China’s permanent delegate to the United Nations Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE) in 1948-49 and Chairman of the Board of Trustees for Rehabilitation Affairs (BOTRA) 1949-50 to help reconstruct China with long-term economic development. In 1951, Li immigrated to the U.S. where he began as a lecturer in economics, becoming professor of business administration in 1958, and Chairman of the Center for Chinese Studies (1961) at his alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley. 

Çiğdem Kağıtçıbaşı (IH 1961-63)
Social Psychologist, Koç University, Turkey

Çiğdem Kağıtçıbaşı (29 January 1940 – 2 March 2017) was a Turkish scientist and professor. She was a university professor since 1969 and received the APA Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of Psychology in 1993.
Çiğdem Kağıtçıbaşı was born in Turkey and completed a bachelor's degree at Wellesley College in 1961 and a Doctor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley in 1967 specializing in social psychology. Kağıtçıbaşı began teaching at the Middle East Technical University in 1969 before moving on to Boğaziçi University in 1974. She taught at Boğaziçi until 1995 when she began working at Koç University. At Koç University, she was a social science dean from 1998 to 2001 and later became the university's gender studies director in 2010. Outside of her scientific career, Kağıtçıbaşı held various positions including vice president of the International Union of Psychological Science from 1996 to 2000 and the International Social Science Council from 2004 to 2006. Kağıtçıbaşı authored the widely cited book Family and Human Development across Cultures: A View from the Other Side in 1996, which challenged culture-bound models of human development based on European-American psychological research while offering a dynamic systems perspective on human, social, and cultural development. A second volume, Family, Self, and Human Development Across Cultures: Theory and Applications, was published in 2007, which offered a family change theory of how modernization in non-Western societies impacts family structure. 

Eugene C. Lee (IH 1946-49)
Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at UC Berkeley, and recipient of the prestigious Berkeley Citation in 1999

Eugene C. Lee was a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley and served as the director of the Institute of Governmental Studies from 1967 to June 1988. A former Vice President of the University, Professor Lee was also the first chairman of the Commission on California State Government Organization and Economy ("The Little Hoover Commission"). Prior to joining the University, he was assistant to the city manager of San Leandro, and served as executive assistant to the Democratic candidate for governor. Lee received his B.A. degree from UCLA and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Berkeley, while also serving in the campus administration. Other university teaching and administrative posts were at University College, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and at the University of Puerto Rico. In 1984-1985, Lee was an academic visitor at the London School of Economics and Political Science and at the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy in London. Lee wrote extensively in the fields of state, regional, and local government and politics, and the administration of higher education. His books include The Politics of Nonpartisanship, and — co-authored — The Challenge of California, The Multicampus University, and Managing Multicampus Systems. 

Francesca Gobbo (IH 1969-70)
Professor of Intercultural Education, University of Turin, Italy

Francesca Gobbo has been Professor of Intercultural Education at the University of Turin (Italy), where she also taught Anthropology of Education until retiring in 2014. She was Fulbright grantee (1969), Research Assistant at UC Berkeley (1973-74), Research Assistant with the Carnegie Foundation at Yale University (1974), Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley (1995) and Harvard University (2001). She has lectured at the University of Reading (UK), Charles in Prague (CZ) and Amsterdam (NL). She studies and teaches contemporary educational issues from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective that combines educational theory with methodological and theoretical approaches from the fields of cultural anthropology and anthropology of education. She coordinates research on Italian schools attended by immigrant pupils. She was Associate Editor in Chief of Intercultural Education from 2005 to 2007, and again in 2014. 

Gavan Butler (IH 1965)
Political Economy Professor at the University of Sydney and member of the Senate of the University

Dr Butler is one of the founders of the innovative program in Political Economy which began within the Discipline in 1975. He has been on the editorial committee of the Journal of Australian Political Economy published within the Department, since its first appearance in 1977 and has contributed to the Encyclopedia of Political Economy published in the UK and the USA in 1999. Dr Butler was re-elected in 1997, 1999 and 2001 by the academic staff of the University as a member of the Senate of the University and previously served for many years as a staff-elected member of the Academic Board. Dr Butler’s primary research interest has been in the development of the state, economic policy and human resource development in the countries of Southeast Asia. He has had a long association with the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore and with academics and organizations in the region. He was invited to teach in the English-language Bachelor of Economics program at Thammasat University in Thailand in 1999 and has continued to do so until the present time.

George Foster (IH 1935-37)
Professor of Anthropology, UC Berkeley

George McClelland Foster Jr. (October 9, 1913 – May 18, 2006) was an American anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, best known for contributions on peasant societies (the "principle of limited good" and the "Dyadic Contract") and as one of the founders of medical anthropology. He served as President of the American Anthropological Association (elected 1970) and was elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (elected 1976) and American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 1980). He received the 1982 Malinowski Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology in 2005. A festschrift in his honor was published in 1979. He was married to the linguist Mary LeCron Foster, and in 1997 the U.C. Berkeley anthropology library was renamed the George and Mary Foster Anthropology Library in their honor.

Gerhard G. Mueller (IH 1954-57)
Professor Emeritus of Accounting at the University of Washington

Dr. Mueller is a former member of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (USA) and Professor Emeritus of Accounting at the University of Washington, Seattle. He holds an honorary doctorate in economics from the Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration, Helsinki, and an honorary Doctor of Law Degree from Kwansei Gakuin University, Hyogo, Japan.
At the University of Washington, Dr. Mueller served as the Hughes M. Blake Professor of International Business Management and later as the Julius A. Roller Professor of Accounting. His other services at the University of Washington include Acting Dean of the Business School, Senior Associate Dean, Executive Director of the Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER), Chair of the Department of Accounting, and Director of the Master of Professional Accounting Program. He received BS, MBA, and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley and is a CPA with wide professional and business experience. During 1988-89, he served as President of both the American Accounting Association (AAA) and the Washington Society of CPAs. He is past chairman of the Board of Trustees of Overlake Hospital Medical Center in Bellevue, Washington, and of the Accounting Education Change Commission (AECC).  He is the author, co-author and co-editor of 19 books and more than 100 professional journal articles and reviews. He served on several national advisory committees and boards of directors. He is a fellow of the Academy of International Business. He won several distinguished teaching and outstanding educator awards (American Accounting Association, 1982; University of Washington, 1983; Washington Society of CPAs, 1985; Beta Alpha Psi, 1987; American Institute of CPAs, 2000), and the Wildman Medal in 1986. During 1987, he served as the American Accounting Association distinguished International Visiting Lecturer in seven Black Africa countries.

Gregory Grossman (IH 1939-41)
Professor Emeritus of Economics, UC Berkeley

Gregory Grossman (July 5, 1921, Kiev – August 14, 2014) was late professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, an authority on the economy of the Soviet Union. He is credited with the introduction of the terms "second economy" and "command economy".
He received his undergraduate degree in economics from Berkeley in 1942 and his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1952. He spent his entire career, 1952-1993, at Berkeley. He received the lifetime achievement award from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in 1991. The term "command economy" was introduced in his seminal 1963 article Notes for a Theory of the Command Economy. The term "second economy" was introduced in his another article, The Second Economy of the USSR (1977).

Heinz Eulau (IH 1935-38)
Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science, Stanford University

After the National Socialist takeover of power in 1934 Eulau left Germany and reached the United States in 1935, where he studied political science at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1941 he received his doctorate there. During the Second World War Eulau worked as a propaganda analyst for the United States Department of Justice and later he worked for The New Republic as a journalist. From 1958 he taught as a professor at Stanford University. In 1971/72 ,Eulau was officiated as President of the American Political Science Association. In 1972 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Heinz Eulau Award, an award for outstanding political science publications, was named after him.

Helmer Aslaksen (IH 1982-85)
Professor of Mathematics, National University of Singapore

Helmer Aslaksen was raised in Oslo, Norway. He studied at the University of Oslo before earning his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in 1988. Since 1989, he has been a Professor of Mathematics at the National University of Singapore. His research includes Chinese, Islamic, and Indian calendars, trigonometry of symmetric spaces, lie theory, invariant theory, linear algebra,  history of mathematics, and computer algebra.

"My three years at I-House were the best years of my life. It was both the perfect introduction to the best of American culture, and an unparalleled exposure to parts of the world that I had only dreamt of before. After I-House I feel welcome and comfortable everywhere in the world!"

James Cason (IH 1933-35)
Professor of Chemistry and Dean of the College of Chemistry, UC Berkeley

Cason was born in Tennessee, and attended Vanderbilt University, where he obtained an A.B. Degree in 1934. He earned a M.S. Degree from the University of California at Berkeley (1935) and Ph.D. from Yale (1938), both in organic chemistry. He was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship to Harvard and worked with the National Defense Research Committee during World War II. He taught at DePauw University (1940-41) and at Vanderbilt University (1941- 45), before joining the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1945. For almost four decades, Cason taught organic chemistry at Berkeley and served as Dean of the College of Chemistry in 1955-56. He authored four college textbooks on organic chemistry and published more than a hundred articles in major scientific journals. He served on the Organic Syntheses active board from 1951-1959 and edited Volume 37, which was published in 1957. Cason retired from the University of California in 1983 and for the last twenty years of his life, he and his wife Rebecca split their time between their home in the Berkeley Hills and their old-growth redwood property, named “Camelot,” near Garberville, California.

John Bahcall (IH 1953-56)
Professor of Natural Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, President Emeritus of the American Astronomical Society, and 1999 recipient of the National Medal of Science, the U.S.'s highest science award

John Norris Bahcall (December 30, 1934 – August 17, 2005) was an American astrophysicist, best known for his contributions to the solar neutrino problem, the development of the Hubble Space Telescope and for his leadership and development of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Bahcall began his university studies at Louisiana State University as a philosophy student. He transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, still studying philosophy. He graduated with an A.B. in Physics from Berkeley in 1956, obtained his M.S. in physics in 1957 from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard in 1961. He became a research fellow in physics at Indiana University in 1960 and worked at the California Institute of Technology from 1962 to 1970. He was appointed professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1971. He became a member of the National Academy of Science in 1976. He was president of the American Astronomical Society from 1990–92, and was president-elect of the American Physical Society at the date of his death. Bahcall is most notable and most renowned for his work in establishing the Standard Solar Model. He spent much of his life pursuing the solar neutrino problem with physical chemist Raymond Davis, Jr. Together, Davis and Bahcall collaborated on the Homestake Experiment, creating an underground detector for neutrinos in a South Dakota gold mine. Bahcall's other contribution of great significance to astrophysics was the development and implementation of the Hubble Telescope, in collaboration with Lyman Spitzer, Jr., from the 1970s through to the period after the telescope was launched in 1990. In 1992, he received NASA's Distinguished Public Service Medal for this work. He worked in many other areas. The standard model of a galaxy, with a massive black hole surrounded by stars, is known as the Bahcall-Wolf model. The Bahcall-Soneira model was for many years the standard model for the structure of the Milky Way. He also contributed to accurate astrophysical models of stellar interiors. Bahcall published over 600 scientific papers and five books in the field of astrophysics.

John Heilbron (IH 1956-58)
Professor of History and Vice Chancellor, UC Berkeley

John Lewis Heilbron (born 17 March 1934, San Francisco) is an American historian of science best known for his work in the history of physics and the history of astronomy. He is Professor of History and Vice-Chancellor Emeritus (Vice-Chancellor 1990–1994) at the University of California, Berkeley, senior research fellow at Worcester College, Oxford, and visiting professor at Yale University and the California Institute of Technology. He edited the academic journal Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences for twenty-five years.

Karl Pister (IH 1943-45)
Dean of the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley, Chancellor of UC Santa Cruz, and 2007 recipient of the Clark Kerr Award for Distinguished Leadership in Higher Education by the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate

Karl S. Pister, Chair of the governing board of the California Council on Science and Technology, is former Vice President-Educational Outreach, of the University of California and Chancellor Emeritus of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Prior to retirement, he completed five decades of service to higher education, beginning his career in higher education as Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at UC Berkeley. He served as Chairman of the Division of Structural Engineering and Structural Mechanics before his appointment as Dean of the College of Engineering in 1980, a position he held for ten years. From 1985 to 1990 he was the first holder of the Roy W. Carlson Chair in Engineering. From 1991 to 1996, he served as Chancellor, UC Santa Cruz. He received the Wason Medal for Research, awarded by the American Concrete Institute and was the recipient of Distinguished Alumni Awards from both the University of Illinois and the University of California, Berkeley Colleges of Engineering. The American Society for Engineering Education presented him with the Vincent Bendix Award for Minorities in Engineering, and the Lamme Medal for his contributions to engineering education. He is also the recipient of the Berkeley Medal, awarded by UC Berkeley, the Presidential Medal of the University of California and the Year 2000 Presidential Award of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Pister is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Mechanics, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an Honorary Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning, and the Board of Trustees of the American University of Armenia. He also served as founding chairman of the Board on Engineering Education of the National Research Council.

Lisbet Rausing (IH 1980-81)
Senior research fellow at Imperial College, London, and author of the critically acclaimed biography, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation

Lisbet Rausing is the eldest daughter of Hans Rausing and his wife Märit Rausing. Her grandfather, Ruben Rausing, was co-founder of the Swedish packaging company Tetra Pak. Rausing studied History at the University of California, Berkeley (B.A., summa cum laude 1984) and completed an M.A. (1987) and Ph.D. (1993) in History at Harvard University, where she also taught for eight years. Harvard University Press published Rausing's scholarly biography of Carl Linnaeus, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation in 1999. Throughout her career, she has published a range of articles on related subjects in scholarly journals including "Isis", Representations, Configurations, and History of Political Economy. She has also contributed to the Financial Times and The Sunday Telegraph, and has published a number of pieces on the evolution of archive digitization and on open access to scholarship. Rausing is a senior research fellow at King's College. She holds honorary doctorates from Uppsala University and SOAS and she is an elected member of St Catharine's College, Cambridge. She is also an honorary fellow of the British Academy, the Linnean Society, the Royal Historical Society, The Royal Society of Biology and the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry. She was elected to the Harvard Board of Overseers (2005-2011) and Yad Hanadiv Advisory Comittee (2001-2011). She serves on the Cambridge Conservation Initiative Advisory Board.

M. Ishaq Nadiri (IH 1958-59)
Professor of Economics at NYU, and former Senior Economic Advisor to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan

Mohammed Ishaq Nadiri  is the Jay Gould Professor of Economics at New York University. A former department chair, he was also founder and first director of the C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics. Nadiri emigrated from Afghanistan to the United States at the age of 19 and received his B.S. from the University of Nebraska, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught at UC Berkeley, Northwestern University, University of Chicago and Columbia University. He joined New York University in 1970, has been the chairperson of the Economics Department, and founder and director of the C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics.  Nadiri has actively been involved with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Nadiri has served as a consultant to a number of corporations, governments and international organizations. He is a member of Council on Foreign Relations, American Economic Association, C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics, Center for Japan-U.S. Business & Economic Studies, Committee for Economic Development, Editorial Board Member of the Annals of Economics & Social Measurement. Nadiri has had more than 100 papers published in leading professional journals and several books on productivity, technological change and economic growth. Nadiri served as the Senior Economic Advisor to the President of Afghanistan (SEAP) from 2005-08. He also served as Chairman of the Afghanistan National Development Strategy (ANDS) and Co-Chair of the Joint Coordination and Monitoring Board (JCMB). As the SEAP, Nadiri was responsible for the preparation and publication of many of the most important documents relating to development of Afghanistan, including the Interim-ANDS, the Progress Report on Preparation of the ANDS, the ANDS, the Afghanistan Compact, Afghanistan’s Millennium Development Goals Report, and Reports to the JCMB. 

"I-House was an experience of being part of the human family with all of its variety, intriguing complexity, and wonder."

Margaret Andrews (IH 1983-85)
Associate Dean for Management Programs at Harvard University, Division of Continuing Education

Margaret Andrews is a seasoned leader with over 20 years of experience in higher education, business, and consulting.
Andrews is a highly rated instructor at Harvard University’s Division of Continuing Education, creating and teaching courses and professional programs in leadership, team effectiveness, strategy, and creativity. She has taught in the United States, South America, Asia, and Europe. Andrews has held a variety of positions in higher education, including vice provost at the Hult International Business School, where she managed graduate programs and faculty on five campuses in four countries, associate dean at Harvard University’s Division of Continuing Education, and executive director of the MBA program, alumni relations and marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She is also the founder of Higher Ed Associates, a boutique consulting firm providing research and consulting services to clients in the higher education sector. Andrews is co-author of the StratEDgy blog on Inside Higher Ed and reports on the worldwide management education market for University World News.
Prior to her career in higher education, she held positions as vice president of marketing at Putnam Investments, consultant at Mercer Management Consulting (now Oliver Wyman), and as a CPA at Deloitte and Touche. Andrews hails from California and has an undergraduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley . She earned her graduate degree at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where she was named a Seley Scholar, the school’s highest honor.

Marian Cleeves Diamond (IH 1949-52)  I-House Alumna of the Year 2016

Professor of Integrative Biology, UC Berkeley, and Director of the Lawrence Hall of Science
Marian Diamond is a global YouTube sensation with her Integrative Biology 131 series

Marian Diamond (née Cleeves; November 11, 1926 – July 25, 2017) was a pioneering scientist and educator who is considered one of the founders of modern neuroscience. She and her team were the first to publish evidence that the brain can change with experience and improve with enrichment, what is now called neuroplasticity. Her research on the brain of Albert Einstein helped fuel the ongoing scientific revolution in understanding the roles of glial cells in the brain. Her YouTube Integrative Biology lectures were the second most popular college course in the world in 2010. She was a professor of anatomy at the University of California, Berkeley. Other published research explored differences between the cerebral cortex of male and female rats, the link between positive thinking and immune health, and the role of women in science.

Marion Ross (IH 1947-51)

Professor of Economics Emerita and Dean of the Faculty at Mills College
Ross's extensive service to I-House includes her roles as Chief Financial Officer, Chair of the Finance Committee and member of the Board of Directors. She co-founded the Rafael Rodriguez/Golden Age Scholarship endowment which provides full room and board scholarships plus a stipend.

Dr. Ross lived at International House during a period fondly remembered by residents of that era as The Golden Age. As a resident, Dr. Ross served on the I-House Council and, as an alumna, she was the first woman member of the I-House Finance Committee. Dr. Ross has given 15 years of service to International House, serving as a member of the Board of Directors, Chief Financial Officer, and Chair of the Finance Committee. With Jean Sullivan Dobrzensky, she co-founded the Rafael Rodriguez/Golden Age Scholarship endowment which now totals over half a million dollars and provides full room and board scholarships plus a stipend for two international students. After completing her Ph.D. in economics at U.C. Berkeley in 1959, Dr. Ross began teaching at Mills College in Oakland where she was the Kathryn P. Hannam Professor of Economics and served as Dean of Faculty for two years. Dr. Ross retired after more than forty years as a faculty leader and inspirational teacher who touched the lives of thousands of students.

"It was shortly after the end of World War II. Students came to I-House as veterans, resistance fighters, and Holocaust survivors. I think of Lottie, the only one of her family to survive the concentration camps, and Milton, who hiked at night from Tientsin to southern China to enlist in the American army and was later dropped behind enemy lines to gather intelligence. Great friendships were formed. I found here a spirit of optimism and a sense of rebuilding a world for peace."

Maung Hla Shwe (IH 1953-62)
Professor of Physics, UC Davis, and President of International House Davis Board of Directors

Dr. Maung Hla Shwe earned his B.A in Physics in 1958 with the distinction of Phi Beta Kappa. Shwe continued his education at Berkeley with an M.A. in Physics in 1959 and a Ph.D. in Physics in 1963. Shwe was born in 1934 and is of Burmese descent. His thesis, entitled “The Mean Life of the Neutral Pi Meson” was published in 1962 and was written by using his research with the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley.

Nobuaki Kumagai (IH 1958-60)
President, Osaka University

Nobuaki Kumagai served as President of Osaka University from August 26, 1985 to August 25, 1991. He also was a Professor Emeritus at the University. He passed away on January 21, 2018. Kumagai was a recipient of the Okawa Prize in 1999. It is a prestigious award that is presented annually to persons who have made outstanding contributions to research, technological development and business management in the information and telecommunications fields.

Paulo J.M. Monteiro (IH 1980-84)
Roy W. Carlson Distinguished Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley, and the 2007 recipient of the Global Research Partnership Award from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)

Paulo J. M. Monteiro, Ph.D., is Roy W. Carlson Distinguished Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, University of California at Berkeley and Faculty Scientist, Department of Materials, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Dr. Monteiro is a Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and of the American Concrete Institute (ACI). He has authored and co-authored numerous journal articles, conference proceedings, and reports in addition to having co-authored the Second and Third editions of Concrete: Structure, Properties, and Materials.

Robin Sharwood (IH 1955-56)
Executive Director of the Victorian Law Foundation, and Professor of Law at University of Melbourne, Australia

Robin Lorimer Sharwood was born on 22 June 1931.He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (1953) and Bachelor of Laws (Hons)(1954) from the University of Melbourne. After completing his LLB, Robin served articles of clerkship with the Melbourne Law firm of Norris, Coates and Hearle, and was admitted to practise in 1955. Also in that year, Robin was appointed the Walter Perry Johnson Graduate Research Fellow, University of California, Berkeley, to undertake an LLM, and obtained that degree in 1956. 
In 1958, he returned to Melbourne to take up a position as a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Law where he remained for four years. He was also a Senior Tutor at Ormond College from 1960-62. In 1962 Robin was appointed to a Chair in Law at the Australian National University. In 1965 he was appointed Warden of Trinity College in Melbourne, a position he held until 1973. From 1974 to 1981 Robin was Inaugural Executive Director of the Victorian Law Foundation, which was established to fund legal research and law reform. In 1980, Robin returned to the Law School to teach the historical component of the Legal
Process subject. He has been a Professorial Associate and Fellow since 1989. His service to the University has included periods as a member of Council and as President of the Graduates. For many years Robin held the position of Chancellor of the Anglican Church to the Dioceses of Wangaratta (1974-99) and Ballarat (1995 - 2002). Some of the many other positions Robin has held include Member of the Executive of the Arts Council of Australia (Vic.) 1970 to 1974 and Member of the (Victorian) State Advisory Committee and the Australian Broadcasting Commission.

Roger Revelle (IH 1930-31)
Professor and Director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography and advocate for the establishment of UC San Diego

Roger Randall Dougan Revelle (March 7, 1909 – July 15, 1991) was a scientist and scholar who was instrumental in the formative years of the University of California San Diego and was among the early scientists to study anthropogenic global warming, as well as the movement of Earth's tectonic plates. UC San Diego's first college is named Revelle College in his honor.
Roger Revelle was born in Seattle and graduated from Pomona College in 1929 with early studies in geology and then earned a Ph.D. in oceanography from the University of California, Berkeley in 1936. Much of his early work in oceanography took place at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) in San Diego. He became director of SIO from 1950 to 1964. Revelle was deeply involved in the growth of oceanography in the United States and internationally after World War II. At Scripps he launched several major long-range expeditions in the 1950s, including the MIDPAC, TRANSPAC (with Canada and Japan), EQUAPAC, and NORPAC, each traversing a different part of the Pacific Ocean. Revelle was instrumental in creating the International Geophysical Year (IGY) in 1958. Revelle was also a key figure in the early science of climate change and the greenhouse effect. During the late 1950s, Revelle fought for the establishment of a University of California campus in San Diego. 

Shankar Sastry (IH 1977-78)

Dean of the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley, and Director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS)
Shankar was recently appointed as one of two U.S. representatives on a new United Nations Scientific Advisory Board charged with strengthening "the interface between science and policy," according to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

S. Shankar Sastry is a former Dean of Engineering at University of California, Berkeley. He is currently a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, a professor of Bioengineering, and faculty director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley. From 2004 to 2007 he was the Director of CITRIS (Center for Information Technology in the Interest of Society) an interdisciplinary center spanning UC Berkeley, Davis, Merced and Santa Cruz. He has served as Chairman, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley from January, 2001 through June 2004. From 1999-early 2001, he was on leave from Berkeley as Director of the Information Technology Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). From 1996-1999, he was the Director of the Electronics Research Laboratory at Berkeley. He has coauthored over 550 technical papers and 9 books. Dr. Sastry served as Associate Editor for numerous publications. He was elected into the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) in 2004. He also has received numerous honors and awards, including an M. A. (honoris causa) from Harvard.

Sir Albert Sloman (IH 1946-47)
Chairman, United World Colleges

Sir Albert Edward Sloman (born February 14, 1921 in Launceston, Cornwall, † July 28, 2012 ) was a British Romanist and Hispanist and founding director of the University of Essex. Albert Sloman studied Spanish at Wadham College, Oxford. During the Second World War he was a fighter pilot. He received his doctorate in 1948 with the work The Sources of Calderón's El príncipe constante; Fernando de Portugal was attributed to Lope de Vega (Oxford 1950) and went to the University of California at Berkeley from 1946 to 1947. From 1947 to 1953 he taught at Trinity College Dublin, from 1953 to 1962 he was Gilmour Professor of Spanish at the University of Liverpool (there last dean). Sloman was from 1962 to 1987 the first rector ("Vice Chancellor") of the newly founded University of Essex in Colchester. He built the university on the American model campus university. From 1969 to 1974 Sloman was president of the European Rectors' Conference. Sloman was knighted in 1987.

Urvashi Sahni (IH 1994)
Education reformer in India and recipient of the 2000 Haas International Award; TEDxTalk Speaker(link is external)

Dr. Urvashi Sahni is a social entrepreneur, women rights activist and educationist. Through her various organizations, she has been working for the rights of children and women for over three decades. She is a leading expert in school governance, curriculum reform and teacher training with a special focus on girls’ education and the use of technology in education. She has been recognized by the Obama Foundation Global Girls Alliance and the Clinton Foundation as a Change Maker. She is also the recipient of the India Social Entrepreneur of the Year award by the Schwab-Jubilant Bhartiya Foundation for her work in educating India’s most disadvantaged girls. Dr Sahni was awarded the Ashoka Fellowship in the year 2011. She received Berkeley’s Haas International Award for her efforts to reform education in India and bolster education for girls in the year 1994. Dr Sahni was also invited to be an honorary member of the Clinton Global Initiative. She was also a member of the sub-committee on school education of the Chief Minister's Advisory Council in Rajasthan (2013 - 18). She founded Suraksha, a women rights organisation, in 1983 in Uttar Pradesh, India. She is the founding president and CEO of the Study Hall Educational Foundation (SHEF), under which she has established three K-12 schools. She is the co-founder and director of the Digital Study Hall, which extends the pedagogical practices developed by the foundation to rural and urban schools in Uttar Pradesh and reaches out to over 1,00,000 students and teachers. A prolific social entrepreneur, Dr Sahni also founded DiDi’s, a social enterprise generating sustainable livelihoods for women. She has a Masters and a Ph.D. in Education from the Graduate School of Education in UC Berkeley.  

She is a co-founder and Board member of the Catalyst 2030, which is the world's largest network of social entrepreneurs and leads the education collaboration group. She is currently an Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow at Harvard University.

"I remember my stay at the I-House in 1994 with great joy and fondness. It was one of my happiest times. I was thousands of miles away from home and family, writing my Ph.D. dissertation and the I-House community embraced me with all its rich diversity, so I never felt lonely. I gained greatly from my experience living with the I-House community and carry the memories everywhere. I am at Harvard University right now on a years Fellowship and wish there was an I-House here too, because that is where I would have stayed."

Click to view Urvashi Sahni Spotlight flyer

Wayne Vucinich
Professor of Eastern European Studies, Stanford University

Wayne S. Vucinich (June 23, 1913 – April 21, 2005) was a Serbian American professor and historian, as well as a founding father of the Russian, Slavic, East European and Byzantine studies at Stanford University following World War II. He was also director of the Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies and spent his academic career at Stanford University.
Vucinich was born in the United States to a family of Serb immigrants who had come from Bosnia in the early twentieth century. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, earning a M.A. in East European history in 1936. He continued to pursue his doctoral studies between 1936 and 1941, also studying at Charles University in Prague. After graduating, Vucinich joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and worked as an analyst for the Balkans and the Soviet Union during the Second World War. In 1946, after working in the State Department for a year, he accepted an offer to teach in Stanford's History Department, where he worked until his formal retirement in 1978. From 1972-85, he was director of the Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies. In 1977, he was appointed to Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of Eastern European Studies at Stanford, a chair first established for Vucinich. He held it for many years after his formal retirement in 1978. In his teaching and research, Vucinich covered a broad area of history, encompassing general European history, modern history, history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy, the Balkans, Ottoman and Byzantine history, and nationalities of the Soviet Union. 

William Knox (IH 1950)
Professor Emeritus of Physics, UC Davis, and advocate of the establishment of I-House Davis

Knox, an emeritus professor of physics at the University of California, Davis, was a witty and generous polymath. Knox was born in Pomona and attended UC Berkeley. While he was still an undergraduate in chemistry, he was selected by Glenn Seaborg to become a member of the secret Manhattan Project team tasked with creating the atomic bomb. Throughout World War II, Knox shuttled among sites including Fermi Laboratory in Chicago; Hanford, Washington; and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, working on production and separation of plutonium, which was used in the first atomic bomb tested in New Mexico. He was proud to have been one of the Manhattan Project scientists to sign a letter urging President Truman to detonate the bomb at sea as a demonstration of its might rather than to drop it on a city. After the war, Knox received his Ph.D. in physics from UC Berkeley, worked at the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington on peaceful uses for nuclear energy, and was an assistant professor at Yale University before moving to Davis in 1960. At UC Davis, he helped develop the physics program, serving as chairman, while the department grew rapidly through the 1960s and 1970s. For many years, he also served in the University of California Academic Senate. Knox met his wife, Barbara, and many of his lifelong friends, while living at International House at UC Berkeley. Knox was among the first in Davis to protest the war in Vietnam in 1963. He was an early and active supporter of the civil rights movement, and was active in local politics.

Wolf Homburger (IH 1950-51)
Director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley and author of a number of transportation textbooks including Fundamentals of Traffic Engineering and Introduction to Transportation Engineering. Homburger met his wife, Arlene Levinson, at I-House and dedicated the South I-House Cafe Terrace in her memory.

Homburger joined ITS in 1955 as a junior research engineer. By the time he officially retired in 1990 he was the Institute's assistant director, and his popular classes along with his textbook, Fundamentals of Traffic Engineering, now in its sixteenth printing, had influenced thousands of students and transportation professionals. He combined teaching with a diverse research agenda, lecturing in countries around the world. In 1997, the Institute of Transportation Engineers, a national professional organization, honored him with the Wilbur S. Smith Distinguished Transportation Educator Award. The award recognizes those who have made an outstanding contribution to the transportation profession by relating academic studies to the actual practice of transportation. Homburger was born in Karlsruhe, Germany in 1926. In 1939, at age 12, he was sent to England as part of the last Kindertransport. He spent the war years living with a British family on a farm and attending school at Eastbourne College. He remained in close touch with that family and other school friends and professional colleagues for the rest of his life. As a young man he immigrated to the United States where he was finally reunited with his parents in New York City. He received a Bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering from The Cooper Union in 1950, and a Master's of Science in Civil Engineering from UC Berkeley in 1951. He was naturalized in 1951 and served in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from 1951 to 1955. Homburger met his late wife, Arlene at a UC Berkeley International House alumni event.

Yasuhiko Torii (IH 1960s)
President, Keio University, Japan

The President of Keio University is the chief executive officer of the Keio Gijuku educational corporation, which governs the university, graduate schools, affiliated schools, hospitals, and other institutes. The President accordingly acts as the Chairman of the Board of Trustees. Yauhiko Torii served as President of Keio University from 1993 to 2001. 

Yohannes Haile-Selassie (IH 1995-96)

Ethiopian paleontologist and leader of the archeological team that discovered "Lucy's great-grandfather," a fossil 400,000 years older than Lucy. Also Director of Anthropology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and adjunct professor at Case Western Reserve University

Yohannes began his tertiary education at the Addis Ababa University in Addis Ababa, graduating in the summer of 1982 with a B.A. degree in history. His first job was at the Center for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage in Addis Ababa.
His graduate education began at the University of California, Berkeley, where Yohannes was mentored by Tim White and earned an M.A. in Anthropology in 1995 and a Ph.D. in Integrative Biology in 2001. In 2002, he became the Curator and Head of Physical Anthropology Department at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Cleveland, Ohio, where he works currently. He serves as an Adjunct Professor of Anthropology and Anatomy at Case Western Reserve University and as an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Institute of Paleoenvironment and Heritage Conservation, Mekelle University. Yohannes is well known in the field of paleoanthropology for having a gift for fossil spotting, with his first fossil hunting expedition (White's Middle Awash Project) taking place in 1990. He has been instrumental in the discoveries of the type specimen (principal reference fossil) for Australopithecus garhi and Ardipithecus kadabba and has also found fossil specimens of Ardipithecus ramidus, Australopithecus afarensis, and species of Homo including Homo erectus, as well as Homo sapiens. Since 2004, he has led digs in the Mille woreda of the Afar Region of Ethiopia (the Woranso-Mille Project). In June 2010, Yohannes published a paper describing Kadanuumuu, one of the specimens his group found in Afar. The research conducted by Yohannes has been primarily funded by the Leakey Foundation. He has published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology and Nature.

Adrian Kragen (IH 1930-33)
Deputy attorney general of California under Earl Warren and Professor of Law at UC Berkeley

Kragen, who served as the Shannon Cecil Turner Professor of Law, gave up a lucrative law practice in Hollywood in 1952 to teach at his alma mater. Kragen argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, co-authored a leading textbook on taxation, drafted legislation and published widely in professional journals. From 1940 to 1944, Kragen served as California deputy attorney general under attorney general and then governor Earl Warren ’14. The son of a San Francisco furniture manufacturer, Kragen was the first in his family to attend college. He earned his bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley in 1931 and was inspired to pursue law by Boalt professor and future California Supreme Court Justice Roger Traynor ’27. He served as vice chancellor of the Berkeley campus from 1960 to 1964 and continued teaching at Boalt until 1994, when he retired at the age of 87. A devoted alumnus and an avid fan of Cal athletics, Kragen served on many Academic Senate committees, as chair of the UCB Emeriti Association, on the Boalt Hall Capital Campaign Committee and on the Bear Backers Council. He helped create Camp Blue, a family camp for Cal alumni; and was instrumental in the development of the UC Berkeley Retirement Center. Kragen received many awards, including the California Alumni Association’s Alumnus of the Year award in 1998, the Berkeley Citation in 1973 and Boalt Hall’s Citation Award in 1972.

Barnet Cooperman (IH 1946-47)
Judge on the L.A. Superior Court

Barnet graduated with honors from UCLA in 1943 and was awarded Phi Beta Kappa. He then entered law school at Boalt Hall in Berkeley, CA. Barnet's legal education was interrupted by his service overseas in World War II, where he was a combat infantryman with the 4th Armored Division in Patton's 3rd Army. Barnet was awarded two Silver Stars and a Bronze Star for heroism in combat. Following the war Barnet returned to law school where he met Roz at International House. They married June 29, 1947 in Brooklyn NY. Barnet entered private legal practice and handled a wide variety of civil and criminal cases until 1980, when he was appointed as a Judge of the Los Angeles Superior Court by Governor Jerry Brown. He served with great diligence on the bench until his retirement in 1995, with his tenure most notably including the Appellate and Class Action departments of the Superior Court. Barnet then entered private dispute resolution practice as a judge, arbitrator and mediator, first with JAMS, then ADR. Barnet was active in Democratic politics and community affairs. He was a founder of the West Side Democratic Club, organized local Democratic Nominating Committees, served as Chair of the West Side Democratic Club and was a member of the state Democratic Central Committee. Barnet also served on the boards of public radio station KPFK, a teacher-training nursery school and Temple Israel of Hollywood. In 1994, he was Alumnus of the Year of John Marshall High School.

Ernst Pakuscher (IH 1955-56)
Chief Judge of the German Federal Patent Court

Pakuscher studied law at Eduard Reimer at the Humboldt University in Berlin and received his doctorate in 1951 on copyright . He was a judge at the Federal Administrative Court . From October 18, 1972 to August 1986, he was President of the Federal Patent Court in Munich. He is an honorary professor at the University of Regensburg. Since his retirement, Pakuscher lives in Berlin.

George Kraw (IH 1972-76)
Member of the Advisory Committee of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation

George M. Kraw is a founding member of the Kraw Law Group and specializes in the representation of Taft-Hartley benefit funds. He is a former union representative to the Advisory Committee of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. He belongs to the International Society of Certified Employee Benefit Specialists and is a former chair of the CEBS Committee of the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans. He frequently writes on employee benefit and other law related matters, and has been a contributor to Bloomberg BNA, the National Law Journal, Benefits Magazine, American Lawyer, Los Angeles Daily Journal, and the San Francisco Recorder, among other media. He is a member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Mr. Kraw is admitted to practice in California and the District of Columbia. He received his Juris Degree from the University of California at Berkeley. He also holds a Masters Degree in History from Berkeley as well as a B.A. in History and Russian Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Raymond Terlizzi (IH 1962-64)
Magistrate Judge of the District of Arizona

Raymond Terlizzi was Tucson’s first U.S. magistrate and the nation’s longest-serving magistrate. He was first appointed a U.S. Court Commissioner in 1966. In 1971, the duties of court commissioners were expanded in response to a growing federal caseload and the job was re-titled U.S. magistrate. Terlizzi was the first Southern Arizonian appointed to the position, which he continued to hold until March of 2000. For much of his tenure, Terlizzi was the only magistrate from Tucson, and a “who’s who” of local crime figures passed through his courtroom. Terlizzi was born in Chicago in 1935. He served in the Navy and earned his bachelor’s degree from Notre Dame and a law degree from the University of California at Berkeley before coming to Tucson in 1964.

Rose Bird (IH 1960-61)
Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court

Rose Elizabeth Bird (November 2, 1936 – December 4, 1999) served for 10 years as the 25th Chief Justice of California. She was both the first female justice and the first female chief justice of that court. She was appointed by then-Governor Jerry Brown. In the November 1986 state election she became the only Chief Justice in California history to be removed from office by voters.

Sanford Svetcov (IH 1961-63)
Partner with the Appellate Practice Group at Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1940, to Russian and Polish émigrés, Sanford graduated cum laude from Brooklyn College in 1961, and the next year started at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall Law School.  Sandy briefed and argued nearly 400 appeals in state and federal appellate courts. His first job was with the State Office of Legislative Counsel in Sacramento. His second was as a legal officer in the U.S. Navy, from 1966 to 1969. He would spend the next twenty years as a civil servant, first as Deputy Attorney General of California and later as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Northern District of California. In the latter post, he would wear several hats, including Chief Assistant, Strike Force Chief, Appellate Chief, and office prankster, handling appeals in some of the biggest cases to pass through the Bay Area, including the Patty Hearst case, the San Quentin Six, and The People's Temple case; also, he briefed, argued, and prevailed in the Supreme Court decision in Spain vs. Procunier (involving prison conditions). He was selected by the U.S. Attorney General for the Department of Justice's John Marshall Award for Excellence in Appellate Advocacy in 1986. In 1989, Sanford went into private practice for the first time, joining the environmental and employment law firm Landels, Ripley & Diamond. In 2000, he was hired by his former law clerk Patrick Coughlin to work at what would become the Robbins Geller firm.

Stefan Riesenfeld (IH 1935-37) 
Professor of Law, U.C. Berkeley

Professor Stefan Albrecht Riesenfeld was born in Breslau, Germany and studied at the University of Breslau (now University of Wroclaw, Poland). He received a Dr. Iur. summa cum laude in 1930 for his dissertation on the law of mutual insurance companies. Professor Riesenfeld then practiced with a Berlin commercial firm, and became a research associate of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute, founded by Ernst Rabel. He escaped Nazi Germany in 1934 and came to Berkeley Law to work as a researcher of comparative law for the then-Dean Edwin Dickinson. Speaking little English on his arrival, he nevertheless managed to graduate from Berkeley Law in 1937 with distinction, and to earn a J.S.D from Harvard in 1940. Professor Riesenfeld began his academic career at the University of Minnesota, simultaneously teaching law and earning an undergraduate degree in engineering, but he soon voluntarily enlisted in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and he served as an LST commander in the South Pacific, returning to his teaching post in Minnesota in 1946. In 1952, Professor Riesenfeld joined the Berkeley Law faculty, where he remained until 1976. He received continuous annual re-appointments at the Law School until his death on February 17, 1999 at the age of ninety. During his academic career, he wrote numerous books and articles on a wide range of international law topics, including maritime law, trade and development law, the European Economic Community, treaty law, and labor law. He also served as Counselor for Public International Law at the U.S. Department of State, and was twice engaged to argue major cases before the International Court of Justice in the Hague. 

"I attribute tremendous positive value to my stay in I-House. It helped me to adjust to the life in a country which is now my own but which was then a foreign country to me, and I formed at that time associations and friendships which have lasted since those days." 

Upendra Baxi (IH 1965)
Professor of Law and Vice Chancellor at the University of Delhi; Vice Chancellor at the University of South Gujarat; and President of the Indian Society of International Law

Upendra Baxi (born 9 November 1938) is a legal scholar, since 1996 professor of law in development at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. He has been the vice-chancellor of University of Delhi (1990–1994), prior to which he held the position of professor of law at the same university for 23 years (1973–1996). He has also served as the vice-chancellor of the University of South Gujarat, Surat, India (1982–1985). In 2011, he was awarded the Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award in India by the Government of India.

Wakefield Taylor (IH 1930s)
California Court of Appeal presiding justice and 34th president of the Commonwealth Club

Wakefield Taylor was born in Ukiah (Mendocino County) and graduated from Boalt Hall School of Law in 1937. At Boalt Hall, he was a Charles Mills Gayley Fellow and on the staff of the California Law Review.He was a Navy lieutenant in WWII.  As a young lawyer, he was in private practice in San Francisco and in Contra Costa County as a partner of the late Congressman John F. Baldwin. He later was Antioch's city attorney and a deputy district attorney in Contra Costa County; he was appointed to the Superior Court by Gov. Earl Warren in 1951. In 1963, Mr. Taylor was elevated to the California Court of Appeal in San Francisco by Gov. Pat Brown. In 1970, Gov. Ronald Reagan appointed him presiding justice. He was involved in numerous civic and professional organizations, including serving as president of the Commonwealth Club. Mr. Taylor, who continued attending Cal football games into his 80s, was the first president of the UC Berkeley Foundation in 1972-73, a charter member of the Berkeley Fellows and in 1981 was awarded the Berkeley Citation, an honor given to distinguished alumni. In 1982, he was named Boalt Hall's Alumnus of the Year. He was the founding chairman of the Center for Judicial Education and Research, and served on the State Judicial Council. He also was active in community organizations, including the John Muir Association, the Martinez Historical Society, the Kiwanis Club, the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Boys Club and the Mt. Diablo Council of Boy Scouts of America.

Wolfgang Hoffmann-Riem (IH 1964-65)
German legal scholar, Professor Emeritus at the University of Hamburg, former judge of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany and Recipient of the 2008 Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

Wolfgang Hoffmann-Riem was born into a family of teachers. After passing the general qualification for university entrance (Abitur) at the Walddörfer-Gymnasium in Hamburg, he studied law while minoring in economics at the Universities of Hamburg, Freiburg i.Br., Munich, and Berkeley. He was awarded an LL.M. at Berkeley. In 1964 he passed the first state examination and in 1968 obtained a doctorate in law. After passing the second state examination in 1970, he spent four years working as a lawyer. In 1974 he obtained his postdoctoral qualification (Habilitation), which led to an appointment as professor of public law and public administration at the University of Hamburg. From 1977 to 1979, he was the spokesperson for Law Department II at the University of Hamburg, which offered a new single-tier law education as an alternative to the traditional two-tier education in Law Department I. From 1979 to 1995, Hoffmann-Riem was director of the Hans Bredow Institute for media research and from July 1998 until December 1999, he chaired its newly created directorate. Following his appointment as judge of the Federal Constitutional Court, he became an honorary member of the directorate. From 1981 to 1983, he served as chair of the German Association for the Sociology of Law and from 1989 to 1992 as chair of the German Communication Association (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Publizistik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft, DGPuK). Since 1988 he has been director of the Research Centre for Environmental Law and since 1996 director of the Centre for Research in Law and Innovation, CERI, both at the University of Hamburg. From 1995 to 1997, he was Minister of Justice of the State of Hamburg. During this period, he also chaired the Committee on Legal Affairs of the German Bundesrat. From 1999 to 2008, he served as judge in the First Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court. In 2007 he was appointed by the federal government as the German representative on the European Commission for Democracy through Law, also known as the Venice Commission. In 2009/10 Hoffmann-Riem was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin. Since 2012 he serves as affiliate professor at the Bucerius Law School, Hamburg.

Amir Aczel (IH 1972-76)
Author of Fermat's Last Theorem, Descartes' Secret Notebook and The Mystery of Aleph

Amir D. Aczel was born in Haifa, Israel. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley and graduated with a BA in mathematics in 1975, and received a Master of Science in 1976. Several years later Aczel earned a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Oregon. Aczel taught mathematics at universities in California, Alaska, Massachusetts, Italy, and Greece. He accepted a professorship at Bentley College in Massachusetts, where he taught classes on the history of science and the history of mathematics. While teaching at Bentley, Aczel wrote several non-technical books on mathematics and science, as well as two textbooks. His book, Fermat's Last Theorem, was a United States bestseller and was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Aczel appeared on CNN, CNBC, The History Channel, and Nightline. Aczel was a 2004 Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and Visiting Scholar in the History of Science at Harvard University (2007). In 2003, he became a research fellow at the Boston University Center for Philosophy and History of Science, and taught mathematics courses at University of Massachusetts, Boston. He died in Nîmes, France in 2015 from cancer.

"At I-House, I began to understand that the hatreds on which we had grown up were left far behind us, and that here at I-House, we could see one another as individuals, as people, as warm and caring human beings. For all of us, I-House was a unique place, which would forever stay in our hearts and minds."

Angelika Blendstrup (IH 1970-72)
Business communications consultant and author of They Made It! How Chinese, French, German, Indian, Israeli and other foreign born entrepreneurs contributed to high tech innovation in the Silicon Valley, the U.S. and Overseas

Angelika Blendstrup, Ph.D. is the founder and principal of Angelika Blendstrup & Associates. As of January 2014, she is also Founding Partner & Chief Entrepreneur Evangelist of SV LATAM Fund located in Silicon Valley, investing in Latin American startups; Founding Partner & Chief Entrepreneur Evangelist, ZFunction University, Latin America’s Tech Entrepreneurship Program in SV. She holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University and a Master’s from UC Berkeley. In addition to English, Angelika speaks and teaches in French, Spanish, Portuguese, and German. Angelika coaches international executives and entrepreneurs on US business communications in Silicon Valley and delivers classes at Stanford University’s Continuing Studies, Haas Business School and UCLA Anderson School of Management on US business communications, personal branding and US business presentations. Angelika is the author of They Made It! – featuring interviews with major foreign-born leaders of Silicon Valley, and co-author of Communicating the American Way. She mentors @ 500 Startups, Up West labs [Israeli accelerator] and is mentor and advisor at Brazil Innovators, Endeavor, SiliconHouse and Startup Embassy.

Arlene Blum (IH 1967-68) I-House Alumna of the Year 2017
Mountaineer, writer, and environmental health scientist

Blum was born in Davenport, Iowa and she attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Her first climb was in Washington, where she failed to reach the summit of Mount Adams. In 1970, she requested to join a high altitude expedition, but was told that she was welcome to come as far as the base camp to "help with the cooking." However, she was able to go climbing as part of her research for her senior thesis, which was on the topic of volcanic gases on Oregon's Mount Hood. Blum was graduated from Reed in 1966 and attended MIT and UC Berkeley, where she earned a PhD in biophysical chemistry in 1971. After graduate school, Blum embarked on what she called the "endless winter" – spending more than a year climbing peaks all over the world.
As a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1970s, Blum's research contributed to the regulation of two cancer-causing chemicals used as flame retardants on children's sleepwear. Blum taught at Stanford University, Wellesley College, and the University of California, Berkeley. After a long hiatus, Blum returned to science and policy work in 2006 and her memoir Breaking Trail: A Climbing Life was published. In 2007 Blum co-founded the Green Science Policy Institute (GSP) with the goal of bringing scientific research results into policy decisions to protect human health and the environment from toxic chemicals. As executive director of the Green Science Policy Institute, Blum and her team have led several successful national and international campaigns against the use of toxic chemicals, particularly halogenated flame retardants. Blum has published articles about science policy in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Huffington Post, and Science magazine.
Her first book, Annapurna: A Woman's Place was included in Fortune Magazine's 2005 list of "The 75 Smartest Business Books We Know" and chosen by National Geographic Adventure Magazine as one of the 100 top adventure books of all time.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (IH 1978-79)
International House's 2008 Alumna of the Year and author of several books including The Mistress of Spices and Sister of My Heart

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award-winning and bestselling author, poet, activist and teacher of writing. Her work has been published in over 50 magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, and her writing has been included in over 50 anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, the O.Henry Prize Stories and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her books have been translated into 29 languages, including Dutch, Hebrew, Bengali, Russian and Japanese, and many of them have been used for campus-wide and city-wide reads. Several of her works have been made into films and plays. She lives in Houston with her husband Murthy and has two sons, Anand and Abhay.

David Brock (IH 1973-82)
Author of Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative

David Brock (born July 23, 1962) is an American liberal political consultant, author, and commentator who founded the media watchdog group Media Matters for America. He has been described by Time as "one of the most influential operatives in the Democratic Party". Brock began his career as a right-wing investigative reporter during the 1990s. He wrote the book The Real Anita Hill and the Troopergate story, which led to Paula Jones filing a lawsuit against Bill Clinton. In the late-1990s, he switched sides, aligning himself with the Democratic Party and in particular with Bill and Hillary Clinton. In 2004, he founded Media Matters for America, a non-profit organization which describes itself as a "progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media".[5] He has since also founded super PACs called American Bridge 21st Century and Correct the Record, has become a board member of the super PAC Priorities USA Action and has been elected chairman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

Dick Wilson (IH 1950s)
Author of more than 20 books about Asia including They Changed India

Richard Garratt Wilson (29 November 1928 – January 2011) was an English journalist and writer. Dick Wilson (he used the familiar form of his name throughout his professional life) was born in Epsom, Surrey.  In 1942 he was sent to Cranleigh School where he remained until 1947 when he was called up for National Service and this was followed by his degree course at Oxford. In 1952 he entered International House, Berkeley California studying law. In 1953 he followed this with extensive travels in Southeast Asia before returning to live in London. He worked for the Financial Times for four years before joining the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong as Editor in 1958. He remained in that post until 1964 in which year he was awarded, jointly with Kayser Sung, the Magsaysay award for journalism. He returned to live in London and became largely a freelance author. The first of his many books on China, A Quarter of Mankind, was published in 1966. In 1975 he also took on the editorship of The China Quarterly, continuing until 1980. Wilson had suffered a serious illness during his early traveling years and in later life this led to his posture becoming more and more stooped. However he continued writing well into the 2000s, turning his attention mostly to the Indian subcontinent, but this work appears to remain unpublished. He died in hospital in January 2011. 

Donna Rosenthal (IH 1968-70)
Author of The Israelis: Ordinary People in an Extraordinary Land

Donna Rosenthal is the author of the award-winning The Israelis: Ordinary People in an Extraordinary Land, new and updated in 2008. Called the best book about Israelis in decades, The Israelis has more than 100 excellent international reviews across the religious and political spectrums: from the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post to The Jerusalem Post and Haaretz to The Japan Times. Ms. Rosenthal was a news producer at Israel Television, reporter for Israel Radio and The Jerusalem Post, and a lecturer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times Newsweek and The Atlantic and many other publications. Ms. Rosenthal has reported from Iran, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan and was the first journalist to travel to remote mountain villages of Ethiopia and introduce Israel Radio audiences to the Jews of Ethiopia. A winner of three Lowell Thomas Journalism Awards: Best Investigative Reporting, Best Foreign Travel Reporting (The New York Times) and Best Adventure Travel Writing, she has reported from the Middle East, Asia and Africa and South America. An expert on contemporary Israelis, she frequently is interviewed on TV and radio about Israel—from CNN to ABC to National Public Radio.  In a Publishers Weekly's national survey, Ms. Rosenthal placed in the TOP TEN most popular speakers about Israel—and only female author. She has spoken about modern Israelis at over 25 universities—from Harvard to UCLA to Georgetown. And to audiences from Silicon Valley to Japan and from Germany to Australia. Ms. Rosenthal has taught journalism at three universities. She holds a BA from University of California Berkeley (Political Science) and a Masters of Science (International Relations/Middle East) from The London School of Economics.

Edmundo Paz Soldán Ávila (IH 1991-93)
Author of The Matter of Desire

José Edmundo Paz-Soldán Ávila (Cochabamba, March 29, 1967) is a Bolivian writer. His work is a prominent example of the Latin American literary movement known as McOndo, in which the magical realism of previous Latin American authors is supplanted by modern realism, often with a technological focus. His work has won several awards. He has lived in the United States since 1991, and has taught literature at Cornell University since 1997. He has resided in the United States since 1991. He graduated B.A. in political science in 1991. His first novel, Días de papel, was a finalist in the 1991 Letras de Oro literary competition for United States works. The novel won the Erich Guttentag Prize, and was published in 1992. He obtained an M.A. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures in 1993, and a Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures in 1997, both at University of California, Berkeley. His Ph.D. thesis was on the life and works of Alcides Arguedas; stemming from this research, a biography was published in 2003. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006.

Firoozeh Jazayeri Dumas (IH 1986-87)
Author of Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America and Laughing Without an Accent

Firoozeh Dumas (born 1965 in Abadan, Iran) is an Iranian American writer who writes in English. She is the author of the memoirs Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America (2003) and Laughing without an Accent: Adventures of a Global Citizen (2008), and the semi-autobiographical novel It Ain't so Awful, Falafel (2016). At the age of seven, Dumas and her family moved to Whittier, California. She later moved back to Iran and lived in Tehran and Ahvaz. However, she once again immigrated to the United States; first to Whittier, then to Newport Beach, California. She began to write and submit essays to obtain money to go toward college. She attended the University of California, Berkeley where she lived at International House Berkeley and majored in art history. Dumas struggled to mix with her American classmates, who knew nothing about Iran. She also retells firsthand experiences of prejudice and racism from being Iranian in America during the Iranian Revolution. However, throughout hardships, she emphasizes the significance of family strength and love in her life. Ms. Dumas was honored in 2009 as Alumnus of the Year for her efforts to promote understanding of Iranian culture and for reminding us – through her books, speaking tours, NPR commentaries, and articles – that our commonalities far outweigh our differences.

"My experience at I-House confirmed what I already knew: our commonalities far outweigh our differences. It is in places such as International House that we learn to see beyond nationalities, borders, and religions and see instead our shared humanity. It is the only recipe for world peace."

Gray Brechin
Historical geographer, journalist, television producer and author of Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin and co-author of Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream

Gray A. Brechin (born September 2, 1947) is an American geologist, architectural historian, and English-language author. He is founder, and as of 2017 project scholar, of the Living New Deal Project. Brechin is a frequent and popular speaker, especially on subjects related to the history and legacy of the New Deal and the history of San Francisco.

Gustav Olivercrona (IH 1946-52)
Swedish television commentator

Gustav Olivercrona was a Swedish journalist and author. In 1947 Olivercrona graduated from the Stockholm School of Economics. After studying at UC Berkeley outside of San Francisc , he got a job at the San Francisco Chronicle. He worked with Pierre Salinger, who later became press secretary for John F Kennedy. Olivercrona was employed by Sweden Radio 1952-1984. Together with Åke Ortmark and Lars Orup, he formed the group, the three O's, which are considered to have introduced the shooting iron journalism in Swedish television . Among his books are The New Millionaires. Olivercrona was the son of the brain surgeon Herbert Olivercrona. He was married to actress Gunnel Broström from 1958 until his death.

Harold Gilliam (IH 1941-42)
Environmental columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and author of The San Francisco Experience and Weather of the San Francisco Bay Region

Harold Gilliam (1918 – December 14, 2016) was a San Francisco-based writer, newspaperman and environmentalist, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner newspapers. The Harold Gilliam Award for Excellence in Environmental Reporting, given by The Bay Institute, is named in his honor. Gilliam was born in Los Angeles and earned a bachelor's degree in political science from UCLA and a master's in economics from UC Berkeley; he later studied under Wallace Stegner at the Stanford Writing Program. He served in the 11th Armored Division in Europe in World War II. Gilliam began his career in journalism as a copy boy at the Chronicle, where he was soon made a reporter. In 1954 he became a freelancer, then in 1960 began an environmental column at the Examiner; the following year he returned to the Chronicle, where he continued his column, called "This Land", until retiring in 1995. San Francisco Bay, his first book, was on The New York Times bestseller list for 19 weeks. It led to his being invited to be a founder member of Save the Bay. Gilliam was one of the first environmentalist journalists, and helped mobilize public opinion to save many features of the San Francisco Bay Area. In the 1960s, through an article and personal contacts, he helped achieve a Marin County ordinance forestalling the bulldozing of archaeological sites. His article "The Destruction of Mono Lake Is on Schedule", which appeared in the Examiner in March 1979, was one of the first public accounts of the then ongoing destruction of Mono Lake; in 1993 he was the first recipient of the Defender of the Trust award from the Mono Lake Committee. The Bay Institute named its Harold Gilliam Award in his honor. The group also gave him its Bay Education Award in 1995.

Marianne Likowski Alireza (IH 1941-1943)
Author of At the Drop of a Veil, an autobiographical account of her International House romance with Ali Abdullah Alireza, leading to the first marriage between a Saudi man and a western woman.

Alireza is indeed a native of Muskogee, Okla., but she grew up in California and, through marriage, became the first Western woman to live in Saudi Arabia. Alireza's Arabian adventures started with a campus romance. Ali Alireza was majoring in business and she was studying romance languages when they met in a paleontology class at the University of California at Berkeley. They married in 1943, the year Marianne Alireza graduated.  In 1945 the Alirezas had their first child, and Ali Alireza was a Saudi Arabian delegate to the United Nations charter conference in San Francisco. He so impressed Prince Faisal, who later became king, that he was assigned to work in the Foreign Ministry back home, ending his studies and taking his family to Saudi Arabia. Her Christianity was respected. Alireza says it never occurred to her to try to convert anyone to Western ideas or ways.To Alireza`s surprise, her ex-husband`s family ''stood by me 200 percent. It shocked the heck out of Ali. They were horrified because I had been a real mother, I didn't turn the children over to help and I had taught them because there were no schools.'' Alireza`s decision to leave Saudi Arabia and start a new life was determined by her children. Marianne passed away on May 26, 2019 in Saudi Arabia.

Markos Kounalakis (IH 1977-78)
President and publisher of Washington Monthly

Markos Kounalakis (born December 1, 1956) is a Greek-American journalist, author, scholar and the Second Gentleman of California after his wife, Eleni Kounalakis, was elected Lieutenant Governor, taking role on January 7, 2019. Kounalakis is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. and a senior fellow at the Center for Media, Data and Society at Central European University. Kounalakis writes a weekly foreign affairs column for The Miami Herald and McClatchy-Tribune News and is a frequent foreign affairs analyst for CBS News and CNN International. His work was awarded with a 2018 National Society of Newspaper Columnists award citing "Kounalakis's world affairs columns not only offer strong prose and strong opinions, they offer an education." In 2019, he won a SPJ Sunshine State Award for his foreign affairs commentary and criticism. Kounalakis is president and publisher emeritus of the Washington Monthly, a magazine founded by Charles Peters in 1969. Along with Ray Suarez, he co-hosts the WorldAffairs podcast and syndicated radio program. He co-anchored with Peter Laufer the nationally syndicated weekly political program, Washington Monthly on the Radio.

Richard H. Dilon (IH 1946-49)
Author of many books on American history including award-winning Meriwether Lewis: A Biography, North American Indian Wars, Napa Valley Natives, and Captain John Sutter: Sacramento Valley's Sainted Sinner

Richard Hugh Dillon is a native Californian, educated at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the head librarian of San Francisco’s Sutro Library, a branch of the California State Library and the author of many articles and books on California’s colorful history. He has taught at the University of San Francisco; the Fromm Institute; the University of Hawaii; and the University of California, Los Angeles. As an author and historian, Dillon and his books have earned awards from the California Historical Society; the American Association for State and Local History; Laura Bride Powers award for distinguished service to the city of San Francisco; Oscar Lewis Award from the Book Club of California; and the San Francisco Historical Society. His book, Embarcadero, won a James D. Phelan Award in Literature and another work, Meriwether Lewis, was awarded the Gold Medal of the Commonwealth Club as the best non-fiction book by a Californian. Dillon himself is descendant of Irish immigrant grandfathers; one a California gold miner and another, a soldier of the Union Army in the Civil War. He grew up in a family steeped in military history where his father, a legendary local war hero, was both married and buried at the San Francisco Presido. Dillon served in the US Army during World War II and returned to California with a Purple Heart.

"I remember my years at I-House as among the happiest of my life. I-House became a base for my first real exploration of my native state, thanks to the kindness of individuals like Doug Powell, Doug Negi, Tad Mori, and Tak Yamamoto. That is what I remember most - kindness and camaraderie. Probably, simple incidents like these led me to change my field of study from Latin American history to American history."

Robbie Clipper Sethi (IH 1973-74)
Author of Fifty-Fifty, a celebration of diversity's complexities told through the story of a Punjabi family

Robbie Clipper Sethi was born in New Jersey, educated at Indiana University and the University of California, Berkeley, and is associate professor of English at Rider University, Lawrenceville, N.J. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Mademoiselle, The Literary Review, California Quarterly, Massachusetts Review and other journals and anthologies in the U.S., India, and Italy.   Her husband, Davinder Sethi, is a Punjabi Sikh who was raised in New Delhi and came to the United States in the early 1970s.

Sandy Close (IH 1961-64)
Executive Director, Pacific News Service

Alexandra (Sandy) Close is an American journalist and the founder of Ethnic Media Services. She was the Executive Director of Pacific News Service from 1974 to 2017 and of New America Media from 1996 to 2017. Close received her B.A from the University of California, Berkeley in 1964. Close worked as the China editor in Hong Kong for the Far Eastern Economic Review in the mid-1960s. Upon her return to the U.S. she co-founded Oakland-based newspaper The Flatlands. She was also a weekly commentator for Morning Edition from 1984-85. In 1991, she founded Yo! Youth Outlook, a monthly magazine of youth writing and art, and in 1996, she co-founded The Beat Within, a weekly journal written by incarcerated youth. She served as the Executive Director of Pacific News Service from 1974 to the publication's closing in 2017. In 1996, she founded New America Media, which involved up to 3,000 ethnic news organizations in California, and served as its Executive Director until its closure in 2017. In 2018, Close founded Ethnic Media Services, a non-profit agency focused on developing cross-cultural journalism and marketing projects to promote inclusive public discourse. Close was a co-producer for the film Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject) in 1996.

Ved Mehta
New Yorker staff writer for more than 30 years and author of several books including his autobiographical work, Face to Face. 

Ved Parkash Mehta (born 21 March 1934) is a India-Born writer who was born in Lahore, British India (now a Pakistani city) to a Punjabi Hindu family. He lost his sight at the age of three to cerebrospinal meningitis. Because of the limited prospects for blind people in general, his mother, Shanti Mehta, and father, Amolak Ram Mehta, a doctor, sent him over 1,300 miles away to the Dadar School for the Blind in Bombay. He was educated at Pomona College, at Balliol College, Oxford where he read Modern History, and at Harvard University, where he earned a double BA and MA. While at Pomona, one of Mehta's student readers, because very few books were available in Braille at that time, was Eugene Rose, who went on to become the Russian Orthodox hieromonk Father Seraphim Rose. His first book, an autobiography called Face to Face, which placed his early life in the context of Indian politics and history and Anglo-Indian relations, was published in 1957. Mehta published his first novel, Delinquent Chacha in 1966. It was serialized in the New Yorker. Since then he has written more than 24 books, including several that deal with the subject of blindness, as well as hundreds of articles and short stories, for British, Indian and American publications. He was a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1961 to 1994. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009. 

Alan Pasternak (IH 1959-64)
Energy expert and staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Technical Director at California Radioactive Materials Management Forum

Alan D. Pasternak was chosen by then-Governor Jerry Brown to be one of the original appointees to the California Energy Commission, where he served from 1975 through 1979. He was previously a member of the scientific staff of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory where he worked on the development of new energy technologies, including coal gasification and the use of methyl alcohol for fuel. He received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from UC Berkeley and his B.S. from Columbia University, where he rowed on the Varsity Lightweight Crew. He graduated from the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City and after college served as an officer in the U.S. Navy from 1956-1959. After leaving the Energy Commission, Mr. Pasternak worked as a consultant and as the lobbyist and Technical Director of the California Radioactive Materials Management Forum, which he served for the remainder of his career. In 1990 he returned to Livermore part-time to resume his work on energy policy. In that capacity, in 2000 he wrote the paper, "Global Energy Futures and Human Development: A Framework for Analysis," which addresses the importance of electricity to the developing world. A Google search for that title will return some 1,700 hits representing citation in hundreds of articles and texts. Mr. Pasternak (who eschewed the designation "Doctor") passed away September 24 2010 at his home in Lafayette, California.

Chien Shiung Wu Yuan (IH 1936-42)
Professor Emeritus of Applied Physics and Nuclear Engineering at Columbia University, Manhattan Project scientist and the so-called "First Lady of Physics" 

Chien-Shiung Wu (May 31, 1912 – February 16, 1997) was a Chinese-American experimental physicist who made significant contributions in the field of nuclear physics. Wu worked on the Manhattan Project, where she helped develop the process for separating uranium into uranium-235 and uranium-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion. She is best known for conducting the Wu experiment, which proved that parity is not conserved. This discovery resulted in her colleagues Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang winning the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics, while Wu herself was awarded the inaugural Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978. Her expertise in experimental physics evoked comparisons to Marie Curie. Her nicknames include the "First Lady of Physics", the "Chinese Madame Curie" and the "Queen of Nuclear Research".

In 2021, the U.S. POSTAL SERVICEreleased a new Forever Stamp(link is external) honoring the late Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu, one of the most influential nuclear physicists of her era.

Cyril Ponnamperuma (IH 1959-61)
Director of the Chemical Evolution Division, NASA Ames Research Center

Dr. Cyril Andrew Ponnamperuma (16 October 1923 – 20 December 1994) was a Sri Lankan scientist in the fields of chemical evolution and the origin of life. In 1948, he obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from the University of Madras. Later he moved to the United Kingdom and enrolled at Birkbeck, University of London, where he obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in 1959. At the same time he had the opportunity to work with Professor J. D. Bernal, a pioneering scientist engaged in research on the origin of life. In 1962 he received a doctorate in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley under the direction of the Nobel Laureate Melvin Calvin. In 1962, he was honored with a National Academy of Science resident associateship with NASA at Ames Research Center. In 1963 he joined NASA's Exobiology Division and take over the helm of the Chemical Evolution Division. He was selected as the principal investigator for analysis of lunar soil brought to earth by Project Apollo. He was closely involved with NASA in the Viking and Voyager programs and was offered membership in both the Space Science Advisory Council and Life Sciences Advisory Council of NASA. He produced over 400 scientific publications and held a number of prestigious academic posts during his rather short lifespan. The "Third World Academy of Sciences" (TWAS) based in Trieste, Italy elected him as its vice president in 1989 and appointed him Chairman of the International Network of Science Centres in selected developing Countries. He contributed immensely to the Third World Foundation of North America as its Chairman. He was the first director of the "Arthur C. Clarke Centre for Modern Technologies" in Sri Lanka, and in 1984 was appointed science advisor to the President of Sri Lanka by the late President J. R. Jayewardene.  The Atomic Energy Commission of India offered him an assignment as a visiting Professor in 1967. UNESCO appointed him for a period covering 1970-1971 as its Director of the Programme for the development of basic research in Sri Lanka. 

David Scheuring (IH 1957-61)
Founding Director of Yolo Land Trust and Director of the Cache Creek Society

David Scheuring, the owner of Gold Oak Ranch and recipient of the 2002 Thomson/Rominger Award, has been farming for more than 40 years. He is a third-generation farmer and has taken part in the evolution of organic production and sustainable agriculture techniques. In addition to his busy life on the farm, David is active in his community, including being one of the founding members of the Yolo Land Trust.

David Shirley (IH 1953-62)
Director at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

David Arthur Shirley (born March 30, 1934) is an American chemist, best known as the fourth director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 1980 to 1989, and for spearheading the funding and creation of the Advanced Light Source.
David Arthur Shirley was born in North Conway, New Hampshire, on March 30, 1934. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from the University of Maine in 1955, and then entered the University of California, Berkeley, where he completed his PhD. Shirley became a lecturer in chemistry at Berkeley in 1959, an assistant professor in 1960, an associate professor in 1964, and a full professor in 1967. The following year he became chairman of the Chemistry Department. He was a National Science Foundation fellow at Oxford University in 1966–67, and was awarded the United States Atomic Energy Commission's Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award in 1972. His early research was into low temperature physics, nuclear orientation, and hyperfine interactions, particularly the Mössbauer effect, and he was a pioneer of X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy.
In 1975, Shirley became the Associate Laboratory Director and Head, Materials and Molecular Research Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He was its fourth director, from 1980 to 1989, and was the first chemist to head the laboratory. He took the helm at a time when the laboratory had to deal with deep funding cuts, and spent most of his first two years in the job managing them. Having weathered the crisis, he attempted to prevent its recurrence by broadening the range of research projects, such as research into treatments for ocular melanoma, and development of Mina Bissell's extracellular matrix model of breast cancer. In 1987, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory was chosen to participate in the Human Genome Project.

F. Drew Gaffney (IH 1967-68)
Astronaut and Professor of Medicine at Vanderbilt University

Francis Andrew "Drew" Gaffney is an American doctor. He previously worked for NASA and participated in the STS-40 Space Life Sciences (SLS 1) Space Shuttle mission in 1991 as a payload specialist. Gaffney was a co-investigator on an experiment that studied human cardiovascular adaption to space flight. The SLS-1 mission crew completed over 18 experiments in nine days, bringing back more medical data than any previous NASA flight. Dr. Gaffney became a member of the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Space Biology and Medicine, serving from 1992 to 2000. He is a professor of medicine (cardiovascular disease) at Vanderbilt University and continues to serve as a consultant and reviewer for human spaceflight-related studies. He is currently a professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University. Gaffney has over 50 publications in the areas of cardiovascular regulation and space physiology.

 Hans-Peter Dürr (IH 1953-56)
Director, Max Planck Institute

Hans-Peter Dürr (7 October 1929 – 18 May 2014) was a German physicist. He worked on nuclear and quantum physics, elementary particles and gravitation, epistemology, and philosophy, and he has advocated responsible scientific and energy policies. In 1987, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for "his profound critique of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and his work to convert high technology to peaceful uses."  Born in Stuttgart, he completed his Ph.D. in 1956 after studying physics in Stuttgart (Dipl.-Phys. 1953) and at University of California in Berkeley, supervised by Edward Teller. In 1962 he was a guest professor in Berkeley, California and Madras, India. In the 1980s, Dürr advocated the cause of peace as a member of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. In 1983, he helped co-fund the Scientists' Initiative "Responsibility for Peace", which led to the Scientists' Peace Congress in Mainz attended by 3,300 scientists and the Mainzer Appell, a declaration against further nuclear armament. In 1990, another large scientists' convention in Göttingen warned against the militarization of space. In support of these conventions, Dürr gave a series of lectures at numerous German universities. Dürr is a leading critic of the American Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), otherwise known as Star Wars. In 1986 Dürr proposed a World Peace Initiative, on a similar scale to the Strategic Defence Initiative, to solve environmental problems, and achieve social justice and peace.  More recently, Dürr has contributed to the global environmental movement. He served as a member of the board of Greenpeace Germany and as a member of the International Advisory Council on the Economic Development of Hainan in Harmony with the Natural Environment in China. In 1996, Dürr was made a member of the UN Secretary General's international advisory group for the Habitat II Conference in Istanbul. From 2006 until his death, he was a founding councillor at the World Future Council, and a supporter of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, an organisation which campaigns for democratic reformation of the United Nations.

 Mario Báncora (IH 1946-52)

Director, Atomic Energy Commission of Argentina

While working with the Atomic Energy Commission of Argentina, Mario Báncora worked closely with Ronald Richter during his nuclear fusion work in Bariloche. Mario Báncora was the 1969 recipient of the Elise and Walter A. Haas International Award, a distinction given to non-U.S. native Berkeley alumni who have made significant contributions to their home countries.

Mohamed Ahmed Selim (IH 1938-43)
Head Engineer for the High Dam in Egypt

Dr. Selim studied Civil Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley while living at I-House. He earned his M.S. in Civil Engineering in 1939 and went on to receive his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering in 1941. Upon his return to Egypt, Dr. Selim was tapped as one of the several engineers who worked on the Aswan Dam Hydroelectric Project. He served as the Head Engineer for the project. Before the High Dam was built, even with the old dam in place, the annual flooding of the Nile during late summer had continued to pass largely unimpeded down the valley from its East African drainage basin. These floods brought high water with natural nutrients and minerals that annually enriched the fertile soil along its floodplain and delta; this predictability had made the Nile valley ideal for farming since ancient times. However, this natural flooding varied, since high-water years could destroy the whole crop, while low-water years could create widespread drought and associated famine. Both these events had continued to occur periodically. As Egypt's population grew and technology increased, both a desire and the ability developed to completely control the flooding, and thus both protect and support farmland and its economically important cotton crop. With the greatly increased reservoir storage provided by the High Aswan Dam, the floods could be controlled and the water could be stored for later release over multiple years.

Rafael Rodriguez (IH 1946-50)
Costa Rican artist and botanist, specializing in orchids

Rafael Lucas Rodriguez Caballero (24 of March of 1915, San Ramo , Costa Rica - 29 of January of 1981), was a biologist , botanist and illustrator of nature Costa Rica. Rafael Lucas Rodríguez Caballero was born in San Ramón on March 24, 1915. Since his childhood he was occupied by two hobbies: nature and drawing. He attended primary school at the Juan Rudín and Porfirio Brenes Schools. Then he moved to the United States to continue his education. Driven by his teaching vocation, when he returned to Costa Rica and still very young, he worked at the Liceo de Costa Rica as assistant preparer of the lessons of Natural History, Zoology and Botany In 1941, when The University of Costa Rica opened its doors, Mr. Rafael Lucas entered the School of Sciences, where he remained studying for four years. In order to expand his knowledge, in 1945 he obtained a scholarship and moved to the University of Berkeley, in California where he earned a doctorate.

Saul Griffith (IH 1994-95)
Australian-American Inventor

Saul Griffith (born 1974) is an Australian American inventor. He is the founder or co-founder of multiple companies, including Otherlab (where he is currently CEO), Makani Power, and Instructables. In 2000, Griffith graduated from the University of Sydney with a Master of Engineering degree. He won a scholarship to MIT Media Lab to study towards a PhD that he completed in 2004. The subject of his PhD thesis was "self-replicating machines". They were one of the first instances of artificial replication being demonstrated using real physics. Saul is the co-founder and CEO of OtherLab, a research and development company working on computational manufacturing and design tools and applying those tools to projects such as inflatable pneumatic robots and prostheses, novel approaches to heliostat design, and applications of computational origami to the design of pressure vessels (e.g. for compressed natural gas) in arbitrary shapes. Otherlab's R&D is guided by a vast map of energy flows in the US economy, which they use to identify key leverage points in building a more sustainable energy economy. Previously, he was a co-founder of Squid Labs, and its spinout companies and projects Makani Power, Instructables, Wattzon, HowToons, OptiOpia, Potenco and Monkeylectric.

Theodore Taylor (IH 1946-49)
Nuclear physicist and advocate for peaceful applications of nuclear energy

Theodore Brewster Taylor was an accomplished American theoretical physicist, specifically concerning nuclear energy. His higher education includes a PhD from Cornell University in theoretical physics. Although Dr. Taylor is relatively unknown to the public, his most noteworthy contributions to the field of nuclear weaponry were his small bomb developments at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico. He is credited with numerous landmarks in fission nuclear weaponry development, including having developed the smallest, most powerful, and most efficient fission weapons ever tested by the US. Though Dr. Taylor was not considered a brilliant physicist from a calculative viewpoint, his vision and creativity allowed him to thrive in the field. The later part of Dr. Taylor's career was focused on nuclear energy instead of weaponry, and included his work on Project Orion, nuclear reactor developments, and anti-nuclear proliferation.

William Haseltine (IH 1963-68)
CEO, Human Genome Sciences

William A. Haseltine (born October 17, 1944) is an American biologist, entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is known for his groundbreaking work on HIV/AIDS and the human genome. Haseltine was a Professor at Harvard Medical School where he founded two research departments on cancer and HIV/AIDS. Haseltine is a Founder of several biotechnology companies including Cambridge Biosciences, The Virus Research Institute, ProScript, LeukoSite, Dendreon, Diversa, X-VAX, and Demetrix. He was a founder Chairman and CEO of Human Genome Sciences, a company that pioneered the application of genomics to drug discovery. He is the President of the Haseltine Foundation for Science and the Arts and is the Founder, Chairman, and President of ACCESS Health International, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to improving access to high quality health worldwide. He was listed by Time Magazine as one of the world's 25 most influential business people in 2001 and one of the 100 most influential leaders in biotechnology by Scientific American in 2015.

Wilmot Hess (IH 1949-50)
NASA official and Associate Director of the Department of Energy

Wilmot N. Hess (October 16, 1926 – April 16, 2004) was an American physicist who was involved with many ambitious scientific projects of the 20th century, including: the Plowshares project, the NASA Apollo moon missions, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) hurricane research and oil spill cleanup research, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) weather modification research, and the US Department of Energy Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) project. Dr. Hess retired as the Associate Director of the US Department of Energy, of which he was first elected in 1976. Hess lived in California, and died on April 16, 2004 at the age of 77, of leukemia.