The Foundation has recently launched its STEM program, an initiative supported by a grant from the Knight Foundation. STEM K-12 education is a key priority area for SVEF as it lies at the foundation of workforce development in a “knowledge economy.” The purpose of this initiative is to strengthen the learning, teaching, and community engagement processes of STEM education in Silicon Valley. This will be accomplished by identifying the gaps and best practices in STEM education, and making policy recommendations for improvement.
STEM Leadership Advisory Board
Dave Cortese
Dave Cortese is vice mayor of the City of San Jose. He grew up in San Jose as part of a family that has been active in civic, cultural and business affairs for generations. He places high priority on transportation issues, housing, education, neighborhood business and traffic improvements, and has been a leader in promoting tougher ethical standards at City Hall. Cortese was first elected to the San Jose City Council in the Fall of 2000, and was the only councilmember re-elected without opposition to a second four-year term in 2004. He lives with his wife Pattie and four children, David, Jr., Gina, Angela, and Matthew in the Evergreen area of San Jose.
Don Dawson
Member of the Board of Directors of the California Teachers Association. Previously
served on the National Education Association.
Bernard Golden
Bernard is an accomplished high technology
executive whose experience in starting and building world-class organizations
spans nearly two decades. He has previously served as a Venture Partner for
an international venture fund and has been Vice President and General Manager
in a number of private and public software companies, including Informix,
Uniplex Software, and Deploy Solutions. He is a frequent speaker on Information
Technology topics and has been featured in industry publications such as InfoWorld,
UnixWorld, O'Reilly onLAMP, and eWeek.
Marc Liebman (Superintendent Berryessa SD)
Dr. Liebman has over 30 years of experience in education. He has taught at
the elementary and high school levels, served as a site principal and district
level administrator and has over 10 years experience as superintendent most
recently in the Marysville Joint Unified School District. During his six and
a half years in Marysville, he helped the district increase student achievement,
lower high school drop outs and increase the number of graduates continuing
their education at two and four year colleges. He is proudest of significantly
increasing the rate of student literacy in a district that members of the
State Board of Education characterized as one of the most improved school
districts in California. He also worked for the IBM corporation where he was
responsible for establishing an educational consulting practice grades K-12
which focused on the effective use of technology in the teaching learning
process.
Frank Lin
Frank has spent six years in the venture capital industry. At Newbury, Frank
focuses on components and software investments. He is a Board observer at
Sensor Platforms and Andigilog, and is also involved with Newbury’s
investments in BDNA, Liquid Computing, MetaLINCS, and PS’Soft. Prior
to joining Newbury in 2004, Frank was a Principal at Panasonic Ventures, the
venture capital arm of Matsushita Electric, where he directed Panasonic’s
U.S. business development efforts and helped drive investments in P-Cube (acquired
by Cisco), Premier Retail Networks (acquired by Thomson), Raindance (RNDC),
and MontaVista Software. Previously, he worked at Goldman Sachs and at Salomon
Smith Barney, focusing on technology investment banking and mergers &
acquisitions. Frank holds an A.B. with honors in Applied Mathematics from
Harvard and an M.B.A. from the Haas School of Business at the University of
California at Berkeley.
Mark Miller
Mark L. Miller, Ph.D. founded The Miller Institute (d.b.a., learningtech.org),
incorporating it as a 501(c)(3) non-profit in March 2000. He continues to
serve as both its lead technical contributor and CEO. The mission of the organization
is to help "children of all ages" use technology more effectively
for learning. Learningtech.org has already helped schools throughout the San
Francisco Bay and Los Angeles areas, with projects ranging from Classroom
Technology Officers to Build-a-Computer to Program-a-Robot to Miracle at Bayshore:
Are we on the Internet yet, Mr. Peck? Services include: technology plan preparation;
network design; grant preparation assistance; E-rate applications; server
and router configuration and administration; data wiring installation; laboratory
setups; workstation cloning; technology impact assessments; purchase recommendations;
web hosting; workshops for students; and staff development for teachers. Institute
staff members have contributed to the efforts of Smart Valley (Net Day and
PC Day), Challenge 2000, Wired for Good, and the Center for Excellence in
Non-profits. The Institute works closely with K-14 schools and other non-profits
on all aspects of technology planning and implementation.
Krishna Sankar
Krishna is a Distinguished Engineer at the AON-BU in Cisco Systems. Krishna's
experience ranges from Software Architecture and Development to Industrial
Engineering to being Author, Speaker, Entrepreneur and Technology Evangelist.
He has been part of standard bodies including W3C, OASIS, JCP Executive Committee,
WS-I, ZigBee and security task force in the European Union. He has been participating
with various initiatives like the PKI workshop by NIST/Internet2 and was the
chair of the 2003 workshop. His work always included the conceptual (disruptive
innovations, people, organization & interoperability aspects) as well
as the technological underpinnings.
His external interests include FLL Robotics, Ubuntu Linux and Linux Kernel.
His last book was on Wireless LAN Security and is currently working on a couple
more
Jim Spohrer
Dr. Jim Spohrer is the Director of Almaden Services Research, with the mission
of creating and deploying service innovations that matter and scale well both
internally to transform IBM and externally to transform IBM client capabilities
("double win" service innovations). Service system innovation is
a multidisciplinary endeavor, integrating technology, business model, social-organizational
and demand innovations (just think about the ubiquity of credit cards, and
what it took to make that service system innovation global; also, too often,
people focus on the invention of the light bulb, and forget about the service
system innovations required to make that point technology innovation beneficial
to so many). Prior to joining IBM, Spohrer was at Apple Computer, attaining
the role of Distinguished Scientist, Engineer, and Technologist (DEST) for
his pioneering work on intelligent multimedia learning systems, next generation
authoring tools, on-line learning communities, and augmented reality learning
systems. He has published in the areas of speech recognition, artificial intelligence,
empirical studies of programmers, next generation learning systems, and service
science. Spohrer graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Yale University
(specializing in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science) in 1989 and
a B.S. in Physics from MIT in 1978.
Alan Stern
Alan is Senior Corporate Counsel for Cisco Systems, where he is responsible
for advising the company on strategic alliances, technology licensing, and
the use of Open Source software. Prior to joining Cisco in 2006, Mr. Stern
was Assistant General Counsel at Sun Microsystems, where he worked on various
Open Source initiatives, including Sun's recent release of the Java Virtual
Machine under the GPL 2. Mr. Stern received his J.D. from Stanford Law School
and has an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Ed Warnicke
Ed Warnicke holds a bachelors degree in Physics and Mathematics from Purdue
University and a masters in Physics from Rutgers University. He has been employed
by Cisco Systems for the last 7 years, and is currently in the area of business
of developer productivity, with a focus in open source issues.
Ed's publicly visible involvement in open source includes sitting on GPLv3
Committee B, contributing to Ethereal (now named Wireshark), contributing
to the book 'Packet Sniffing with Ethereal', and numerous presentations at
Eclipsecon.
Ed has extensive background in Linux, J2EE Applications, the Eclipse IDE
and holds a CCIE http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/le3/ccie/index.html
