Stanford Emeriti/ae Council Autobiographical Reflections

On February 27, 2025, Phil Pizzo, David and Susan Heckerman Professor and former Dean of the Stanford School of Medicine, treated an audience of emeriti/ae community members to an absorbing lecture entitled “The Threads That Connect a Life.” Pizzo narrates his story along two dominant themes – discovery and social justice – that have animated his life and career choices. Deciding to commit to education as the only way to escape a difficult early life in the Bronx, he is fascinated by experiments, studies philosophy and marine biology at a Jesuit college, makes his way through medical school, and pursues a passion for microbiology and infectious diseases at the National Institutes of Health. Marrying very young and coming of age in the tumultuous 1960s, he joins peace marches and becomes involved in HIV/AIDS advocacy and treatment especially for children. Never having been interested in academic administration, he is nonetheless enticed to become Stanford Medical School dean in 1995 and embarks on strategic planning and new thinking about education, research, clinical care, and physician-scientist training. Partial to entirely new beginnings, Pizzo next creates Stanford’s Distinguished Careers Institute, a new model for higher education focused on intergenerational learning, community, and opportunities for impact throughout the lifespan. And in his most recent life transition, he and his wife convert to Judaism, and he begins rabbinical school, later adding a program of spiritual care and counseling. Following the path of tikkun olam, “repairing the world,” Pizzo continues to seek social justice.

On October 23, 2024, Claude M. Steele, Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences, Emeritus and Professor of Psychology, Emeritus in the School of Humanities and Sciences, presented “A Talk for My Emeriti Colleagues.” Through a candid personal chronology of his life, he illuminates how the nature of race had been a central issue from the day of his birth in a segregated hospital on the south side of Chicago in 1946, through his K-12 education in all-Black and all-white schools, and how race eventually influenced his interest in the emerging field of social psychology. In search of “good problems” for research and publication in academia, Steele focused on different topics, including understanding addictive behaviors such as alcoholism. He describes influential research on affirmation and stereotype threat that help to explain the “underperformance” of students of color and of women in math and sciences. Service as a leader at Columbia and UC-Berkeley involved with the fraught topic of diversity helped to shape Steele’s views on what hasn’t worked, and a possible new path for making diversity work: a focus on building conditions that enable trust in the important settings of our lives, including our schools, businesses, classrooms, and churches.

On May 15, 2024, John R. Rickford, the J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Humanities, Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, engaged emeriti/ae community members with a lecture and slide presentation, entitled “Speaking My Soul: Race, Life and Language.” Rickford dedicates the lecture to his colleague and good friend David Abernethy who had recommended him for a Danforth Fellowship in 1971 thus allowing him to go on to graduate school and pursue an academic career. The talk follows the structure of Rickford’s recently published memoir of the same title, leading his listeners through his life growing up in Guyana, South America, stories about his family and ancestors, student days at Queen’s College high school, attendance at UC Santa Cruz, wedding to wife Angela in 1971, and influential mentors that inspired him to pursue the field of sociolinguistics obtaining his PhD at University of Pennsylvania. He talks about leading “learning expeditions” as Stanford director of African and African American Studies to the South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands, Jamaica, and Belize. He recaps the experience in 1990 of teaching with David Abernethy at a Stanford in Oxford summer program on “Britain in the Third World and the Third World in Britain.” Rickford discusses issues such as the use of African American Vernacular English, the life of Dennis Brutus, an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa (who lectured in the Oxford program), and the visit to Stanford of Frederic Willem de Klerk, President of South Africa. Rickford ends by remarking that he has had a life-long love affair with Stanford and plays a short video of the Stanford Chamber Orchestra performing “Hail, Stanford, Hail.”

On February 28, 2024, Myra Strober, Professor of Education, Emerita, and Professor Emerita of Economics (by Courtesy) at the Graduate School of Business, treated an audience of emeriti/ae community members to a wonderful lecture, entitled “Ninety Men and Me: Some Autobiographical Reflections.” Speaking candidly and from the heart, she traced the arc of her life as a student, wife, and mother of young children, making her way in academia beginning in the 1960s at a time when women were rare as graduate students and even more rare as professors. Discovering along the way that she was a “feminist,” she created, through her research, the new field of gender (or feminist) economics and helped to found what is now Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research (initially the Center for Research on Women). Strober spoke about leading the joint MBA-MA in Education degree program, teaching a popular course entitled Work and Family for many years, and recently co-authoring a book, Money and Love: An Intelligent Roadmap for Life’s Biggest Decisions. With humorous anecdotes and an unfailingly positive attitude, Strober described the difficult challenges she had faced and the valued support she has received in her professional and personal life.

On Nov. 15, 2023, Michael S. Wald, the Jackson Eli Professor of Law, Emeritus, reflected on his 57 years at the Stanford Law School combining research, teaching, and university service. He also described professional periods of leave including at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the San Francisco Department of Human Services. He acknowledged his good fortune as a white male growing up in the 1950s within a highly supportive educational system and community, leading to Cornell University as well as Law and Political Science degrees from Yale University. He contrasted his own experiences with those of highly disadvantaged children who are often trapped on a “school to prison” conveyer belt. He discussed the ways in which his research and involvement in drafting state and national legislation had been focused on bettering the life chances of families and children who must overcome poverty and inequality in order to thrive. Wald reflected dismay over the vast and unintended expansion of the U.S. welfare system over the past thirty years. He stressed that deep interdisciplinary collaborations, such as those he and faculty in the social sciences and medicine had carried out at Stanford’s Boys Town Center for the Study of Children, Youth and Families, will be necessary at universities like Stanford if multiple structural barriers are to be surmounted.

On Apr. 19, 2023, Ann Arvin, the Lucile Salter Packard Professor of Pediatrics and Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, Emerita, a nationally recognized scientist, spoke to an emeriti/ae audience. She shared some of her experiences growing up on a farm and as a “faculty brat.” She commented on her undergraduate years at Brown University as a philosophy major, followed by an MD at the University of Pennsylvania, with just seven female students who found the patriarchy “alive and well,” but were active in seeking changes. Arvin noted that becoming an assistant professor in a Medical School clinical department brings with it the demanding and simultaneous new role of attending physician and “decider” in patient care.  She also reflected on the challenges of joining Stanford in 1978 as one of very few women faculty across campus, gravitating to each other and founding a Faculty Women’s Caucus to help bring about change. She described the excitement of her research career in molecular virology and infectious diseases, focusing on the varicella zoster virus (which causes chicken pox and shingles). Enticed into leadership through the University Fellows Program, Arvin served from 2006 to 2018 as Stanford’s Vice Provost and Dean of Research, and she offered perspectives on Stanford’s robust system of of interdisciplinary programs and institutes, envied by many peer universities. In response to a question, Arvin expressed pride in being a physician-scientist and the hope that this valuable and rewarding model will continue.

On Feb. 15, 2023, Paul Yock, the Weiland Professor of Bioengineering and Medicine, Emeritus, treated an audience of emeriti/ae community members to a wonderful lecture, entitled “Tales of a Medical Gizmologist,” about his life and career. After a middle-class upbringing in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, he attended Amherst College and Oxford University, studying both science and philosophy, then attended Harvard Medical School and pursued a career as an interventional cardiologist first at UCSF followed by Stanford. He provided a fascinating “insider’s” perspective on the major role that Stanford has played in creating the large Bay Area medical technology ecosystem. Tracing the story from the 1980s when several faculty members who became health technology pioneers left Stanford due to a perceived lack of support for their innovation activities, he discussed the present environment where the university, and particularly the School of Medicine, is placing heavy emphasis on “translational” research bringing discoveries forward into patient care. This evolution was reflected in the inclusion of an early Medical Device Network as part of the “Bio-X” concept, the creation of innovation fellowships in 2001, the launch of many start-up companies from Stanford Biodesign, and the creation of the Bioengineering Department, uniquely housed in two schools. He discussed in some detail how the biodesign process is being taught and improved, for example by ensuring that consumers of health care are involved in the research phase. A beneficial fusion of entrepreneurship and scholarship was evident throughout this talk, in which Yock acknowledged his mentors and predecessors.

In a lecture on Nov. 15, 2022, Clayborne Carson, the Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor of History, emeritus, spoke in the Emeriti/ae Council’s “Autobiographical Reflections” lecture series. He traced the path of his early life growing up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, undergraduate and graduate studies at UCLA, becoming a “historian” rather unintentionally, and his almost fifty-year career at Stanford. He described his early interest in the civil rights movement, focused principally on young activists his own age, especially those in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which became the subject of his first book. Carson explains how he was asked by Mrs. Coretta Scott King to edit and publish her late husband’s speeches, sermons, and other writings, and became the founding Director of the King Institute at Stanford. He also spoke about his collaboration with PBS on the Eyes on the Prize documentary series which led him to write two plays about King’s life and teachings, which have been performed in China and in Palestine. Carson is continuing his online educational efforts by establishing the World House Project at the Freeman Spogli Institute, collaborating with international human rights advocates to realize King’s vision of a global community in which all people can “learn somehow to live with each other in peace.”

On April 20, with an introduction by Professor Emeritus David Abernethy, Professor Emeritus William Durham presented a lively Abernethy Autobiographical Reflections lecture to Emeriti/ae at the Stanford Faculty Club. Durham’s lecture highlighted three widely distinct aspects of evolution from the biological, to the cultural, to the personal.

First, stemming from the blue-footed booby photo of Professor Emeritus Lubert Stryer’s recent Abernethy lecture, Durham considered the origin of the iconic Blue-footed Boobies of Galapagos. Here opportunistic mating and the elevated importance of blue feet evolved to an essential reproductive strategy in both female and male blue-footed boobies. The seasonal shift in blue-footed booby foot color to aqua is dependent on dietary carotenoids from sardines (in turn from phytoplankton) and correlates with their ocular spectral sensitivity range and with cold mineral-rich marine upwellings nearby. The foot-color shift to “sardine blue” points to a Galapagos origin for the species, counter to orthodoxy in the field.

In the second, surprising example, Durham discussed a classic cultural anthropological study of the Thongpa, a group of tax-paying serfs in traditional Tibet and Tibetan-speaking Nepal. Cultural inheritance in this society resulted in an exceptional diversity of marriage practices tightly managed by parents with the long-term goal of uniting all legal heirs of each generation into a single marriage with inheritance, thus to hold on to the essential land. This cultural practice was maintained in the context of extreme climate, low primary production in the steep agricultural valleys, and financial tolls exacted by the local manorial landlords. Thongpa emigrants to India do not continue those diverse marriage practices. There were clear adaptive advantages to the practice in the homeland, yet it’s a product of cultural evolution – an important correction, says Durham, to the claims of sociobiology.

In keeping with the theme of Autobiographical Reflections, in his final example Durham credited his childhood interest in finding fossils, from brachiopods to trilobites, during limestone treasure hunts near his home in Northern Ohio. In his personal “evolution,” the enduring question remains: what are the origins of the diversity of life?

On Feb. 16, 2022, Lubert Stryer, the Winzer Professor of Cell Biology, Emeritus, delivered a lecture entitled “Light and Life.” Born in China in 1938, he shared memories of his childhood in Shanghai during WWII. US visas for his family came through a few months before Shanghai was taken over by Mao. After high school in New York, he graduated at the age of 19 from the University of Chicago, where he met his wife, Andrea. After receiving his MD at Harvard, he devoted himself to basic science research. As a postdoctoral fellow, he studied physics before going to the Medical Research Council in England. His mentors included Elkan Blout, Edward Purcell, and John Kendrew. In 1963, Dr. Stryer was recruited to the Biochemistry Department at Stanford as an assistant professor. in 1969 he was recruited to Yale as Professor of Molecular Physics and Biochemistry. He returned to Stanford in 1976 to serve as the founding chair of the new Structural Biology Department.  

Long fascinated by “the interplay of light and life,” Stryer pioneered the application of fluorescence spectroscopy to explore the dynamics of biological macromolecules. Stryer and Haugland established that the efficiency of energy transfer is dependent on the inverse 6th power of the distance between two light absorbing groups, the donor and acceptor molecule. This led to the realization that energy transfer can be employed as a “spectroscopic ruler” as cited in over 12,000 scientific papers by now.

As a second theme of his reflections, Stryer focused on how light acts on photoreceptor cells to trigger a signaling pathway to initiate vision.  Here he described the distinct lines of evidence converging to lead to his discovery of an amplifying protein. This protein in rods allows for incredible sensitivity to light and underlies how a single photon can trigger the activation of a neuron. This story is told in a way that the sequence of gaps and discoveries is revealed. Stryer shared a sense of gratitude for a rewarding life of research and teaching, and for the rich, collaborative environment at Stanford.

Throughout his life, and in appreciation of Life, Stryer is captivated by visual imagery and color. Retiring at the age of 65, though still mentoring students and younger colleagues, the “gift of time” is allowing new explorations in international travel with Andrea, and in art through his nature photography. His lecture was capped by a handful of stunning photographs, including gorgeous examples of color in the natural world.