Candidate for
Board Member; Castro Valley Unified School District

I am very proud to be a member of the Castro Valley Board of Education, and I hope to continue that work for the next four years. I am also very happy to be Castro Valley's representative to the Eden Area Regional Occupational Program governing board.

Since my daughters started kindergarten in Castro Valley, I have been deeply involved in our schools, including two years as president of the Proctor School PTA and five years as president of the Castro Valley Educational Foundation. As President of the Education Foundation I brought many innovative programs to enhance the education of all of our students (science festival, art and poetry festival and anthology, summer enrichment classes, Foundation Lectures).

In my professional like, I am a biologist. For the last 19 years, I have worked at The Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, where I am the manager of scientific communications. I previously worked as a research scientist at two biotech companies in Burlingame and Foster City. I was educated in the public schools in Madison, West Virginia. I earned a BA (zoology) and an MS (biology) from West Virginia University and a PhD (biological sciences) from Carnegie Mellon University. I also completed postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University (biochemistry and molecular biology) and Johns Hopkins University (molecular genetics).

My wife, Shirley, and I have lived in Castro Valley for more than 20 years. Shirley is a nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit at Alta Bates Medical Center in Berkeley. Our two daughters attended Proctor School, Creekside Middle School, and Castro Valley High School. Our oldest daughter is now a sophomore at the University of Oregon, and our youngest just graduated from Castro Valley High School in June 2014 and is now a freshman at South Dakota State University.