Cal Poly Alumni Association Announces 2008 Honored Alumni

SAN LUIS OBISPO – An astronaut, an architect, and the nation’s top printer are among this years Honored Alumni at Cal Poly.

Receiving the Honored Alumni award this year are: Joe Bannon of Carmel, Ind.; Rebekah Gladson of Corona del Mar; B. Quentin Lilly of Malibu; Christina McEnroe of Buellton; Gregory Chamitoff of Pearland, Tx.; Robert C. Tapella of Alexandria, Va.; and Anne Marie Bergen of Columbia. This year’s Cal Poly Alumni Association Distinguished Service Award Winner is Nancy McCracken of San Jose.

They will be honored during Homecoming 2008 at the Honored Alumni Banquet Nov. 7, and again during halftime at the Mustang’s Homecoming Game Nov. 8 on campus.

Details on the 2008 honorees:

Joe Bannon, Agriculture Business, 1976, College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences. Bannon credits his education at Cal Poly for preparing him to enter the world of business immediately on graduation.

Bannon is executive director for international operations with Elanco Animal Health (headquartered in Greenfield, Indiana). The global research-based company was founded in 1954 and manufactures and markets products to improve the health of animals. Elanco employs approximately 2,500 people and markets its products to more than 100 countries.

Bannon has held numerous other positions with Elanco, including director of swine and poultry for the United States and area director for Elanco in Vienna, where he was responsible for marketing operations in Austria, Switzerland, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

Bannon is a life member of the Cal Poly Alumni Association. He currently serves as chairman of the Dean’s Advisory Council for the College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences, continuing his active involvement with Cal Poly.

Bannon and his wife, Denise, live in Carmel, Indiana. They have three children.

Rebekah Gladson, Architecture, 1977, College of Architecture and Environmental Design. Gladson is associate vice chancellor and campus architect for the University of California, Irvine (UCI), where she oversees the design, construction, inspection and contracting for all major capital projects on campus and at the UCI Medical Center. She excels in these efforts in part because of her undergraduate and graduate studies at Cal Poly. “My experience there with interdisciplinary integrated teams helped me develop the critical thinking essential in working with complex projects,” she says.

Under Gladson’s leadership, UCI has become known for a vision of architecture conducive to research, teaching and learning. UCI’s aggressive expansion effort (comprising $2.4 billion in construction to date) has received numerous awards for design and building excellence. In 2006 Gladson was honored with the Brunelleschi Lifetime Achievement Award from the Design-Build Institute of America (DBIA) and the Client Achievement Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects, California Council.

This year Gladson received the coveted S.I.R. Award from the Associated General Contractors of California. Her keynote address to the Asia Bridge Summit 2008 in Shanghai introduced critical new concepts to that international conference of design and construction professionals. And she was elected by her peers to the prestigious College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects for her “notable contributions to the advancement of the profession of architecture.”

Gladson is immediate past chair of the DBIA national board and serves on the boards of multiple professional and academic institutions. She lectures at, and consults with, universities and professional organizations worldwide on alternative construction delivery methods, capital programs management, leadership, and strategic analysis and planning.

One example she takes special pride in is a 2007 team effort she led in India to design an orphanage for 1,000 children.

Gladson and her husband, Paul Cooley, live in Corona del Mar, California.

B. Quentin Lilly, Business Administration, 1983, Orfalea College of Business.

Lilly began his diverse and exceptional business career with a Cal Poly internship at a local securities/brokerage firm. Today he is president of Technicolor Home Entertainment Services, the world’s largest manufacturer and distributor of DVD, CD and related home entertainment products.

Lilly is responsible for the strategic development and growth of the company’s global operations (including both theatrical and non-theatrical content), as well as a newly formed group for electronic content distribution. Key customers include The Walt Disney Company, NBC Universal, Paramount, DreamWorks and Microsoft. Lilly has also served at Technicolor as senior vice president of planning and development (1994-1997) and as chief operating officer (1997-1999). Previously, he was vice president in the investment banking department at Crowell, Weedon & Co. and a member of the investment banking group at Smith Barney, Harris Upham & Co., Inc. (both in Los Angeles).

Lilly is a member of the Orfalea College of Business Dean’s Advisory Council and its Graduate Programs committee. He frequently hosts tours of Technicolor for Cal Poly undergraduate and MBA students and has been a generous donor to the college, both in current giving and through a scholarship for the future. For several years he has served as a sponsor of the campus chapter of the non-profit Wheelchair Foundation.

Lilly and his wife, Maryam, live in Malibu, California. They have two children.

Christina H. McEnroe, Special Education CRED, 2000, College of Education.

McEnroe knew during her first visit to Santa Barbara County’s Vista de Las Cruces School that she had to teach there. But she needed a special education credential, beyond her multiple subject and reading specialist credentials and her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. “Cal Poly became the lifeline that gave me my dream-come-true teaching job,” she says, “and helped make me the teacher I am today.”

At Vista de Las Cruces, McEnroe added middle school language arts to her teaching schedule and created two new agricultural units, Ancient Civilizations Farmers’ Markets and Home on the Range. Both lessons integrate math, science and language arts standards.

The former resulted in the Ancient Civilizations Farmers’ Market Cookbook, which won second place in the 2006 Santa Barbara News-Press Cookbook of the Year competition. McEnroe also directed an English-language program for Spanish-speaking parents that included a nutrition unit created with the UC Cooperative Extension, and spearheaded the ongoing school gardening program.

McEnroe’s honors include California’s 2005 Outstanding Educator of the Year from the California Foundation for Agriculture in the Classroom; the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2005 Excellence in Teaching About Agriculture Award (the USDA’s highest teaching award, given annually to only five teachers nationwide); an Outstanding Educator Award from Santa Barbara County; and the Santa Barbara County Farm Bureau’s 2006 GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) Foundation Outstanding Educator of the Year. She has received five Impact II grants from the Teachers’ Network of Santa Barbara County, is a member of the Dean’s Council at UC Santa Barbara’s Gervitz Graduate School of Education, and is vice president of the Santa Ynez Valley Therapeutic Riding Academy.

McEnroe and her husband, Paul, live in Buellton, California. They have three children.

Gregory E. Chamitoff, Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, 1984, College of Engineering.

Chamitoff learned discipline as a Cal Poly undergraduate. Most important was “the learn-by-doing philosophy includes taking action, being proactive and persistent, and doing whatever is necessary to achieve a goal,” he says. “I left Cal Poly with the tools I needed to navigate and succeed in the real world.”

This year, Chamitoff is serving as the U.S. flight engineer aboard the International Space Station (ISS), joining two Russian cosmonauts to conduct spacewalks and explore the long-term effects of weightlessness.

At Cal Poly, Chamitoff taught circuit design lab courses and was an intern at Four Phase Systems, Atari Computers, Northern Telecom, and IBM. He earned a master’s in aeronautical engineering at Caltech (1985) and a doctorate in aeronautics and astronautics at MIT (1992), where he worked on the Hubble Space Telescope, space shuttle autopilot upgrades and the space station’s altitude control system. His thesis offered a new approach to hypersonic vehicle flight control. From 1993 to 1995 he taught courses and led research in flight dynamics and control at the University of Sydney, Australia.

Chamitoff joined the Johnson Space Center’s motion control systems group in 1995, was selected as an astronaut in 1998 and qualified for mission specialist in 2000. In 2002, he earned a master’s in planetary geology (space science) at the University of Houston-Clear Lake and worked in the Aquarius undersea research habitat in the Florida Keys. To prepare for his ISS assignment, he trained on space station systems in Russia, Japan and Canada.

His many honors include election as an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Associate Fellow; the AIAA Technical Excellence Award; the NASA Silver Snoopy Award (for outstanding achievements in human flight safety/mission success); the NASA/USA Space Flight Awareness Award; C. S. Draper Laboratory, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and Tau Beta Pi fellowships; and Phi Kappa Phi and Eta Kappa Nu honor society memberships. He has published widely on aircraft and spacecraft guidance and control and Mars mission design.

Chamitoff and his wife, Chantal, live in Pearland, Texas. They have two children.

The Honorable Robert C. Tapella, Graphic Communications, 1991, College of Liberal Arts. Tapella practiced Cal Poly’s applied-learning approach by building multiple businesses during his undergraduate career.

In 2007 Tapella was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the nation’s 25th public printer (Benjamin Franklin was the first). He is CEO of the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) in Washington, D.C., where he oversees production and distribution of information products and services like the Congressional Record and the Federal Register. In 2004 he was promoted to GPO chief of staff from deputy chief of staff, a position he accepted in 2002 after working as a strategic communications consultant in the private sector.

Tapella brings to his current GPO post a unique combination of skills that includes extensive legislative experience. He served as a professional staff member in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1996 to 2000, supervising the Office of Member Services for the Committee on House Oversight (where he advised congressional members in interpreting and applying the rules and regulations of their office).

Tapella was chief of staff to a House member and he developed a strategic plan for the clerk of the House to re-engineer legislative information technology infrastructures. From 1986 to 1993 he was the district representative for California Congressman Bill Thomas, managing Thomas’ interaction with political and public groups in local and state politics.

As a boy Tapella learned calligraphy, illumination and bookbinding, then became a freelance designer with The New Scribes in San Jose and later worked in menu design, production and printing. During the 1980s he began ventures in print brokering, direct mail, corporate communications and strategic planning. He is a life member of the Cal Poly Alumni Association and an alumnus of the American Council of Young Political Leaders and of Leadership Sunnyvale’s Class of 1995.

Tapella lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

Anne Marie Bergen, Biological Sciences, 1985, College of Science and Mathematics.

Bergen developed her teaching philosophy from the model set for her at Cal Poly.

Currently the leader of the Oakdale Joint Unified School District science program, Bergen discovered the natural connection students had to experiential learning when she was an intern at Sonora’s Foothill Horizons Outdoor School, leading hikes for sixth-grade students and their teachers.

She went on to become head naturalist at Foothill Horizons and later performed a variety of roles in Oakdale schools, including GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) teacher coordinator (1991-2001), district science mentor teacher (1992-1996), district science demonstration teacher (1999-2000), elementary science specialist (1998-2001) and district science fair coordinator (2000-present).

Bergen was named California Teacher of the Year in 2003, Stanislaus County Teacher of the Year in 2002 and a semifinalist for the National Science Teachers Association Shell Oil Science Award in 1998. Other honors include the Amgen Award for Science Teaching Excellence (2006); the CATALYST Award for Excellence in Science Leadership/Instruction (1998); and numerous grants, including a $15,000 Oakdale Education Foundation/Oakdale Irrigation District Community Grant (From the River to the Tap/Salmon Project, 2007-2009), a $20,000 British Petroleum A+ for Energy Grant Award (Passport to Science, 2005-2006) and a $10,000 Toyota TAPESTRY Grant Award (Passport to Science, 2004).

Bergen has been a presenter at conferences sponsored by the Capitol Area Science Education Leaders, the Association of Environmental and Outdoor Educators, the California Science Teachers Association, the National Science Teachers Association and other educational organizations. Her leadership in science education includes directing the Salmonids in the Classroom Program/Oakdale Salmon Project (1995-present) and serving as a member of the Stanislaus Teaching Academy Network advisory board (2001-2004). She has also acted as a K-12 Alliance lead teacher (2001-2004), a science seminar coordinator/facilitator (2003-present) and a Science Olympiad coach (1995, 2001, 2008-2009).

Bergen lives in Columbia, California.

Cal Poly Alumni Association Distinguished Service Award, Nancy McCracken

Home Economics, 1970. McCracken has maintained a rewarding connection to Cal Poly for more than 40 years, from her student days to her life membership in the Cal Poly Alumni Association and service as a chapter leader, president and board member.

McCracken’s Cal Poly education was the foundation for parallel careers as a professional and a consummate community volunteer. From 1988 to 1998, McCracken headed Almaden Embroidery-Monogramming, the company that helped support her children’s college educations. Previously she taught nursery school and worked in retail management. Before her retirement in 2002, she spent two years on the human resources staff of California Water Service.

McCracken has been a PTA president and a member of various educational boards and committees. Since 1977 she has served as president, program vice president and membership chair of the San Jose Area Home Economists.

Her very active involvement with the Girl Scouts of Santa Clara County as a registrar, fund development officer, and school and troop organizer and leader has earned her multiple awards from that organization. They include Outstanding Volunteer (for an exemplary troop program), a special honor bestowed by her own Service Unit members; appreciation and honor pins (for significant impact); the 2002 Chris Arkley Award (for continuing significant impact and outstanding service in operations or policy); the 2004 Gold Key Award (for outstanding administrative service); the 2005 Green Angel (for individual service and dedication); and the 2006 Phyllis Jones Award (for commitment to inclusive girl membership).

McCracken and her husband, Larry, live in San Jose, California. They have two children.

For more details about the awards or the Cal Poly Alumni Association, visit its Web site at www.alumni.calpoly.edu.

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