Nine New Members Elected to Serve on the California Academy of Sciences’ Board of Trustees

SAN FRANCISCO (September 27, 2013)—The Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the California Academy of Sciences, John C. Atwater, is pleased to announce that nine new members have been elected to the Academy's board of trustees. These new trustees are joining the board as the Academy reaches its fifth anniversary in a new facility designed by Renzo Piano, which has welcomed more than 7 million visitors since its opening in September 2008. The new board members are:

Elizabeth H. Blackburn, PhD is the Morris Herzstein Professor in Biology and Physiology in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco and is a leader in the area of telomere and telomerase research. Dr. Blackburn and her research team are working with various cells, including human cells, with the goal of understanding telomerase and telomere biology. Dr. Blackburn earned her BSc and MSc degrees from the University of Melbourne in Australia, and her PhD from the University of Cambridge in England. She did her postdoctoral work in molecular and cellular biology at Yale University. Dr. Blackburn is an elected Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of London, the American Academy of Microbiology, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Among her prestigious awards, in 2007 she was named one of TIME magazine's 100 Most Influential People and was the 2008 North American Laureate for L’Oreal-UNESCO for Women in Science. In 2009, Dr. Blackburn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. She resides in San Francisco with her husband.

Teresa Briggs serves as a Managing Partner at Deloitte & Touche's Silicon Valley office. Briggs arrived at Deloitte & Touche as one of the youngest partners in the firm, when only seven percent of the partners were women, and has worked to redesign the firm's corporate strategy at a national level. Briggs has served on the Management Board of Advisors at her alma mater, the University of Arizona, and she spent eight years serving on the board of the Boys and Girls Club of San Francisco. She also recently participated in the Leadership Group's Annual CEO/Elected Official Cycle-To-Work Day Challenge to help curb climate change, riding from Redwood Shores to downtown San Jose and back. Briggs was named a "Woman of Distinction" in the San Jose/Silicon Valley Business Journal. She holds a degree from the University of Arizona and resides with her husband and son in San Mateo.

Dan Carroll retired as a partner of TPG Capital in January 2011, after a 15 year career at the firm. He joined TPG's San Francisco office in 1995 and was a founder of the firm's Asian operations (formerly Newbridge Capital), where he was responsible for raising and investing five investment funds with over $7B in committed capital as Managing Partner, as well as building the firm's Asia-based investment teams. Carroll currently serves on a number of non-profit boards, including Teach For America - Bay Area, the Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley, Be The Change, and University High School. Carroll graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a degree in economics and holds an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. He and his wife, Stasia Obremskey, have three children and reside in San Francisco.

Juliet de Baubigny joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as a partner in 2001. She works with the firm's portfolio companies and advises them on areas of human capital, including executive leadership, recruiting, compensation, corporate governance and team-building. Before joining KPCB, de Baubigny was a managing director of Ramsey Beirne Associates, a leading provider of executive searches to high-growth, leading-edge companies. Earlier in her career, she was a partner at Heidrick & Struggles, a global executive search firm, where she led CEO and VP searches. de Baubigny began her career with Procter & Gamble in the United Kingdom. She holds a degree in business from the Newcastle Business School at Northumbria University in the United Kingdom. de Baubigny has two children and resides in Menlo Park.

Peter Fenton is a General Partner at Benchmark Capital. He joined the firm in 2006 after spending seven years as a partner with Accel Partners, where his investment interests included software, digital media, and technology enabled services. Fenton was an early supporter of Twitter, where he now serves on its Board. In one 24-hour period in 2009, he was the lead partner behind SpringSource's $420 million sale to VMWare and FriendFeed's sale to Facebook. Fenton also serves on the Boards of Yelp, Zendesk, New Relic, Polyvore, among other companies. Fenton was ranked #5 on the Forbes Midas List in 2012. He received a degree from Stanford University, Phi Beta Kappa and an MBA from Stanford Business School, where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar. Fenton is a competitive tri-athlete and lives in San Francisco with his wife and two children.

David M. Kennedy, PhD is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian specializing in American history, the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus at Stanford University, and the Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. Professor Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history. He is the current editor of the Oxford History of United States series. He has won the Bancroft Prize for Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (1970). In 2000, Professor Kennedy was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History for Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945. Professor Kennedy received a degree in history from Stanford University and MA and PhD from Yale University. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Professor Kennedy is married with two sons and a daughter and resides in Stanford.

Marta Salas-Porras is Creative Director at Obscura Digital and founder of MartaDesign. She holds two international patents and has taught graduate classes in industrial design, created large installations of land art, curated and published a book on climate change, among other achievements. As former Creative Director for Swatch, Salas-Porras produced large scale projections for the 1996 Olympics and fabricated the Fly's Eye Dome for Buckminster Fuller. She is part of the Obscura Digital creative and technology team, designing the ways in which visitors will experience the universe at the future Museu do Amanha, a science museum in Rio de Janeiro. She is passionate about developing new ways in which institutions will engage the public with content across new platforms and the design of intelligent illumination systems embedded into the skins of buildings to bring education, culture and art to mass audiences. Salas-Porras was a Rotary Scholar at the University of Cape Town, attended La Iberro in Mexico City and holds a degree from the Art Center College of Design. She enjoys spending time with her two daughters and resides in San Rafael.

Virginia Goss Tusher, PhD was recently at 5AM Ventures, an early-stage life sciences venture capital firm. There she served as an Associate, conducting due-diligence for prospective investments, and assisting in operations of portfolio companies. She holds a PhD in biochemistry from Stanford University. While at Stanford, she developed the genomic analysis tool Statistic Analysis of Microarrays (SAM). Her work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). She also holds a degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University, where she played varsity volleyball. She serves on the Site Council of her local public school, and is a regular and active classroom science volunteer. She has been a member of the California Academy of Sciences' Education and Digital Strategy Committee for the last several years. Dr. Tusher lives in Marin County with her husband and three children.

Summer Tompkins-Walker is the owner and founder of Walker Valentine, a maker of luxury and customized linens. Previously, she founded the accessories company Summer & The Hatman while still in college at UC Berkeley. Tompkins-Walker sold the company in 1998 to August Hat Company. She is the President of Children of Shelters, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization working to provide support and education for children living in or being served by the homeless shelter system. Tompkins-Walker was a Trustee of the Bay Area Discovery Museum from 2000 to 2006. She and her husband have supported the Hamlin School, Tipping Point Community, Holy Family Day Homes of San Francisco, San Francisco Parks Trust, California Trout, and the Bay Area Discovery Museum. She has also been involved with NARAL, the San Francisco Symphony, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She and her husband Brooks have three children and live in San Francisco.