Class Notes

Thirty-two years after receiving his commission from CU’s Army ROTC, Lou Carmona (OrgMgmt) will retire this summer as a colonel in the Army and Army National Guard. He deployed four times during his military career and served as an Army aviator in active flight status. He plans to continue working in aviation. He writes that he is currently the state Army aviation officer for the California Army National Guard and lives in Northern California, where the fires and floods have kept him busy. He and wife Tamyra have five children.

In November 2017, Daniel Blumstein’s (EPOBio) seventh book, Ecotourism’s Promise and Peril: A Biological Evaluation, was published by Springer International Publishing. Dan is a professor and former department chair at UCLA. He spends his summers studying marmots near Crested Butte.

Eric Grosgogeat (MChemEngr) joined computer software company ANCILE Solutions Inc. as CEO. Previously he was CEO of FocusVision, a market research technology company.

Bill Young (Econ), an international pilot, stays in a lot of hotel rooms. To document the interesting carpet patterns he sees all over the world, he started an Instagram account called @MyHotelCarpet. In November his daughter, Jill, posted the account to her own Instagram page and called for it to have more followers. Her request went viral, and within a few days, 536,000 people followed his page. The story was covered by several major news outlets, including ABC News and Buzzfeed. Bill lives in Dallas with his family.

In San Francisco, Suzanne DiBianca (Comm) is executive vice president of corporate relations and chief philanthropy officer at Salesforce. She is a hall of fame member of the San Francisco Business Times’ Most Influential Women in Bay Area Business. 

Jonathan Treisman (Comm) is the new director of global partnerships for AEG Worldwide, the world’s largest sports and entertainment company. AEG Global Partnerships oversees sponsorship sales and activation for more than 135 venues, sports franchises, music tours and more. Partners include the Staples Center, London O2 Arena, Coachella, Los Angeles Kings and the Taylor Swift and Elton John tours.

After working for 17 years as executive assistant to CU Boulder’s dean of engineering and applied science, Sharon Powers (Comm) is in a new position at the CU ATLAS Institute as senior assistant of partnership engagement. She lives in Superior, Colo.

Serial entrepreneur, inventor and search-and-rescue volunteer Steve Jewett (Geog) is founder of Clean Trails, creator of National CleanUp Day. He is the U.S. host of World CleanUp Day, which this year is Sept. 15. Steve has climbed all of Colorado’s fourteeners, plus Denali and Aconcagua. On Sept. 15, he encourages alumni to join 380 million others in removing litter or trash in their neighborhood, park, trail, river, lake, open space or favorite mountain peak. “Our goal is elimination of trash/litter to enjoy clean spaces, rivers and oceans,” he writes.

Last fall Keith (Fin) and Melissa Downham (Advert) of Denver took their two children on a trip to Africa. They visited Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater, where the giraffes “kept poking their heads up like out of Jurassic Park,” Keith writes. They also camped in the Tarangire National Park.

Musician Michael S. Young’s (IntlAf) praise and worship band, The Ninth Measure, released its debut album, Homecoming, last fall. Michael, who is a vocalist and guitarist, was the main song writer. The album is available on Amazon.

Last February, Rebecca Neumann (MEcon; PhD’00) won a Governor’s Financial Literacy Award in Wisconsin for her efforts to increase financial literacy among the state’s citizens. Rebecca serves on the board of directors for SecureFutures, an organization that empowers teens through financial education.

Matthew Easley (MCompSci; PhD’00) was promoted to brigade general in the U.S. Army Reserve. His children pinned on his new rank during a Jan. 6, 2018, ceremony in Golden, Colo. He is now the cyber deputy command general for the 335th Signal Command (Theater) in Atlanta, Ga.

Nate Hukill (Fin) and Luke Düster (Fin’97) lead Boulder-based CRG, a healthcare-focused investment firm that manages more than $3 billion in institutional capital. The firm also supports technologies, products and services in the life sciences industry. Nate, the president, and Luke, managing director, studied abroad together in Shanghai in the ’90s.

R. Ashby Pate (Engl) will participate in this year’s Alabama State Bar Leadership Forum to train the next generation of legal leaders. Ashby, of counsel at Lightfoot, Franklin & White LLC, also is vice chair of the state bar’s Senior Lawyer-New Lawyer Task Force and chair of the Access to Justice subcommittee, which reviews rural Alabama’s legal needs and challenges. 

Laboratory Conditions, a short film Robert Scheid (Jour, Mgmt) edited and starred in, made the film festival rounds this year. It stars Marisa Tomei and Minnie Driver, both Academy Award winners. In addition to editing, Robert has been acting and teaching editing through institutions and one-on-one with clients since 2002. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and one-year-old son, but writes he makes a yearly trip out to Boulder to recharge. 

Last April Zach Mueller (Span; Nurs’04; PhD’06), a registered nurse with more than 17 years in healthcare, was named chief nursing executive of Medical City Healthcare, where he’s worked since 2011. He oversees the nursing practice, education, operations and research for 14 hospitals in North Texas. He lives in Dallas. 

Mark Ferguson (Fin) has flipped more than 120 houses and sold more than 1,000 as a real estate agent. In 2013, he started Invest Four More to help people become real estate investors. Mark lives in Greeley, Colo. 

Daniel Livesay (Psych) wrote Children of Uncertain Fortune, which delves into the 18th-century migration of elite mixed-race individuals from Jamaica to Great Britain. An assistant professor at Claremont McKenna College, he focuses on early American and Atlantic history, examining the intersection of race, family and slavery in North America and the Caribbean.

Christy Predaina (Astro, CompSci) was awarded the Society of Women Engineers’ 2017 Emerging Leader Award. She was recognized for her leadership capabilities while developing the next generation of engineers and for advancing an innovative approach to systems engineering collaboration. Christy is director of program management operations at Northrop Grumman Technology Services. She lives in Herndon, Va. 

Last year Preston Dyches (Astro) concluded his service as the public information officer for NASA’s Cassini mission, as that spacecraft ended its dramatic final year of operations by making a final plunge into Saturn. He now serves as the lead for public engagement special projects at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.