Sullivan Field is undergoing a major renovation. A new 7 lane, green and
gold, Mondo track surface is being installed as well as complete state
of the art lighting. In addition, a beautiful brick sidewalk will be
installed from the ticket booth to the home bleachers. You can have a
personalized brick added to this walkway.
Click here for more information.
Kevin Stark
So here I am, 20 years later (the same age that my Mom was at our
high school graduation). I used to hear bits & pieces about LAHS grads
from my Mom (she always seemed to know everything that was going on) and
my Dad (who worked in the same group as Susan Brockway before he retired
from LANL). But since they both moved out of NM to Florida in the mid
90's, I don't get back very often and have totally lost touch with
everyone except news through Amy Carroll via her mom (more on that
later).
In the fall of 1987, I was off to Cornell Univ., bucking the mass
movement of the other 87'ers to NMSU, UNM and all points in California.
I was just amazed at the big city of Ithaca, NY (pop. 30,000 when
Cornell and Ithaca College are in session, and of course, all the other
students were annoyed at how small and rural it was), and was totally
unprepared to deal with all the NYC, Long Island, and NJ kids (you know,
people who didn't grow up in a town stuck in the 1950's). I was
determined to take college very seriously, and most certainly,
determined NOT to join Marching Band and only play "serious" music. Of
course, things changed amazingly quickly (my Mom met a Senior Flute
player on the plane and convinced me to give it a shot since it was not
serious and totally fun), and I ended up joining the Marching Band
anyway. So I went from the LAHS band being the focus of my social life
to Marching Band being the focus of my social life for all 4-years in
college.
In Marching Band I met my wife Erinn Gossett who was in my clarinet
rank (the 20th anniversary of our 1st date is actually this winter).
She was a Sophomore and total party girl from New Jersey, who finally
taught me how to stop taking myself so seriously and have a bit of fun.
She really saved me from a workaholic, miserable single life, which is
where I surely was headed. As a result, my grades dropped a bit (and
hers came up too), and overall, we were a perfect example of opposites
attracting (a social work major and an engineering geek).
We were married in 1990 just after Erinn graduated from Cornell and
just before my Senior year. 1-month after our marriage, my parents were
divorced (actually, it was in progress during our wedding, unbeknownst
to us), and we found out the day after we returned from our Honeymoon.
They both remarried in late 1991, my Mom to Jim Greenwood, and my Dad to
Jean Carroll (Amy's Mom). This event created some quite tense shock
waves in our own new marriage, but helped us deal with and address
things very early that would have emerged at some point. As I like to
say, the "honeymoon period" of our marriage lasted exactly the 10 days
of our honeymoon. Both Jim and Jean have become great and loving
grandparents to my kids, and their families have become wonderful
additions to our family.
After graduating from Cornell in'91 with a BS in Electrical
Engineering (EE), we headed to Cleveland, OH for graduate school at Case
Western Reserve U. I loved being in a big city (metro Cleveland has
about the same population as all of NM). Erinn hated it at first, but
warmed up after a while and started making new friends. Erinn got her
Master's in Social Work and worked to help support us while I was still
in grad school. I finished my MS in EE (Control Theory) in 1994 and
quickly switched gears (mostly to follow the research money) into
semiconductor sensor work (Microelectromechanical Systems, aka: MEMS).
We had our daughter Sarah in 1996 and I wrapped up my PhD in 1997. You
can see one of my technical papers online with some pictures of my
microdevices at
http://dora.eeap.cwru.edu/phillips/Memscoupling011997.pdf - note the
gear teeth on the micromotor gears are about the size of a red blood
cell.
I stayed in Cleveland and started work immediately with a startup in
MEMS (employee #7) owned by my graduate advisor (Prof. Mehran
Mehregany). Those were great times! We survived off of government
grants and industry-funded R&D projects - a bunch of 20-something
engineering types and no business / sales people at all to mess things
up. I had a great time designing pressure sensors and other devices,
going to conferences, giving presentations, and managing a $1
Million/year DARPA funded project, getting 4 patents in the process.
After Mehran sold the company to the Goodrich Corp (an Aerospace
company) in 1999, I stayed on and did chemical and pressure sensor and
Silicon Carbide high-temperature research and air-bag accelerometer
product development for another year. Just when things started to feel
slower and too "big company," Mehran was starting a new company, so I
jumped back into the startup game and joined NineSigma (employee #2), in
2000 to try something different. Looking back, it was exactly the right
move, since the Goodrich division closed the Cleveland office a few
years later; laid off some and moved the rest of the employees to the
division HQ in Minneapolis (brrrr!!). It was an interesting transition,
because 2 weeks after I joined NineSigma, our son, Kevin Jr., was born.
NineSigma has been a rough but exciting ride, mostly great, but we've
had some pretty lean years - I've done everything from building
webpages, to doing web searching, government accounting, changing light
bulbs, IT support, software sales, AutoCAD design, managing a software
team, etc. - but now we're now growing like crazy and up to about 50
employees with an office in Tokyo and a new one coming soon in Europe.
Our business is basically to act as consultants or technology brokers to
help companies find technologies to solve their top product development
and R&D needs. The business space is sometimes called "Open Innovation"
and since we're a pioneer in this nascent field, we've been featured as
part of articles on this space (albeit usually a very brief mention) in
Wired magazine, Harvard Business Review, BusinessWeek, and some other
business related books (Mavericks at Work , Wikinomics , and Open Business
Models).
It's amazing to think how far
I've come from being a super shy kid with serious stage fright, and now
I'm leading consulting engagements and having a great time being so
client facing with senior R&D executives.
Through it all I've still played clarinet! I've been fortunate that
I have gone to colleges that have allowed non-music majors to play. In
fact, I still play with the Symphonic Winds at Case Western (going on 16
years with the group) with some really great players. Now, the freshmen
this year (like my stand partner this year) were born in 1987, which is
really weird.
Today, I've been married almost 17 years, Sarah is 11 and in 5th
grade, and little Kevin is 6 and in Kindergarten. I love playing
clarinet with Sarah (now in her 2nd year) - we have been practicing for
a couple of short duets for the art & music night this month, and of
course I'm a total geek enjoying doing algebra with her. Kevie is a
bundle of energy and quite a parenting challenge. And through it all
I've had an amazing partner in life with Erinn - we've been through some
great and tough times, but have always found ways to stick it out.
One of the strangest things is that after all the Stark's moved out
of NM and I lost any connection to "home", my wife's sister Tricia
Phaneuf moved to Rio Rancho a few years ago with her husband Mark (who
went to college at NM Tech). It's great to visit them and see the
mountains (of which we have none here in OH), although I now feel like a
tourist instead of a native. Tricia used to teach Science at Taylor
Middle School in Albuquerque's North Valley (before becoming a full-time
Mom). She recently ran into Jon Shepard who coaches soccer at Rio
Rancho High (the connection was made since she used to coach middle
school girl's soccer). As for my younger brothers: Jeremy (LAHS '89) is
an Assistant Professor at the City of Hope's Radiation Biology Dept.
outside Pasadena, CA after a post-doc at Sloan-Kettering in NYC (his 5th
grade teacher at Barranca, Mrs. Niersen, told our parents not to expect
him to be good enough for college), and Nathan (LAHS '93) lives in
Colorado Springs and works for IBM (married with 2 handsome young boys).
It's great to read what everyone else is up to - drop me a line
sometime stark@ninesigma.com, and of course let me know if you are ever
in sunny Cleveland! I just found out about the website and reunion, so
I hadn't planned on attending, but you never know!
