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Ward Woods '64, Chair
Ward Woods is currently a member of Stanford's Board of Trustees and chair of the Stanford Management Company's Board of Directors. He served on the Board of Visitors of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford from 1996-2002.
He is a trustee and chairman of the executive committee of the Wildlife Conservation Society and a director of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. He was president and chief executive officer of Bessemer Securities, LLC, a privately held investment company, from 1989 until his retirement in December 1999.
Laurie Dachs, '71
Prior to serving as the executive director of the S. D. Bechtel, Jr.
Foundation, Dachs founded and chaired the Lake School in Oakland. She
also is a member on the board of directors of the Nature Conservancy
of California, the Fremont Group Foundation, the Laural Foundation
and the Advisory Council for the Center for Underrepresented
Engineering Students (CUES) at the University of California-
Berkeley's College of Engineering. She earned her undergraduate
degree in psychology in 1971 at Stanford, where she has served on the
board of visitors for the Freeman Spogli Institute for International
Studies since 2001, the Parents' Program Advisory Board since 2004,
and the Think Again Steering Committee in 2002.
Dan Emmett, '61
Dan A. Emmett is the Chairman of the Board of Directors for Douglas Emmett, Inc. He co-founded DEIÕs predecessor companies, Douglas, Emmett and Company, a fully integrated real estate management and leasing company, and Douglas Emmett Realty Advisors, which grew during the 1990Õs into a large manager of institutional real estate funds. Douglas Emmett is one of the largest owners and operators of high-quality office and multi-family properties in Los Angeles and Honolulu.
Dan is a long-time advocate of environmental issues and has been an advisor to Governor Schwarzenegger on environmental and energy issues and has been a founding board member of a number of environmental organizations including Sustainable Conservation, Environment Now, Santa Monica BayKeeper; and the Santa Barbara ChannelKeeper. He serves as Co-Chairman of the Real Estate Roundtable's Environment and Energy Policy Advisory Committee and has served on the Board of the California League of Conservation Voters, the non-partisan political action arm of California's environmental movement.
Dan received his bachelor's degree from Stanford University in 1961 and his J.D. degree from Harvard University in 1964.
Pete Higgins, '80; MBA '83
Pete Higgins is founding partner of Second Avenue Partners, one of Seattle's most experienced teams providing management, strategy and capital to early-stage companies. Prior to founding Second Avenue Partners, he spent 16 years at the Microsoft Corporation, where he was a member of the Office of the President, reporting to CEO Bill Gates.
He is an executive advisor for the private equity firm, Hellmann Friedman, and a strategic director of the venture capital group, Madrona Investments, LLC. He also is a member of the Board of Directors of Long Live the Kings, a Seattle-based salmon advocacy group. He has been a member of Stanford's Board of Trustees since April 2002.
Chuck Katz '69
Chuck Katz is an attorney who manages family investment business. He formerly served as executive vice president of Opsware Inc. in Mountain View, and as an attorney specializing in corporate finance for Perkins Coie in Seattle. He serves on the Board of Directors of REI.
He is married to Roberta Katz '69, associate vice president of strategic planning at Stanford. He holds an MA from New York University and a JD from the University of Texas.
Bill Landreth '69
Bill Landreth has been with Goldman Sachs since 1971, where he is now an advisory director in San Francisco. Previously, he was a general partner in London and Chicago and chairman of the International Executive Committee.
He is a Stanford University lecturer and serves on the advisory boards for the School of Education and the Cantor Center for Arts. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Stanford Management Company. A long-time Stanford volunteer, he was a member of the Board of Trustees from 1996 to 2006 and chaired the visitors committee of the Institute for International Studies. He serves on the boards of The Nature Conservancy-California and Community Hospital Monterey Peninsula. He holds an MBA from Harvard.
Joan Lane
Joan Lane is a special assistant to the Board of Trustees of Stanford University, having worked for the President's Office and board since 1992. Before that she was a special assistant to two deans in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. She is a director of McClatchy Newspapers in Sacramento and previously was a director of the Brown Group Inc. in St. Louis.
She chaired the Board of Trustees of Smith College from 1982-85, and was a member of that board from 1978-85. She also was a director of the James Irvine Foundation, in San Francisco, and a trustee of the San Francisco Foundation.
Jane Lubchenco
Jane Lubchenco is the Wayne and Gladys Valley Professor of Marine Biology and Distinguished Professor of Zoology at Oregon State University. A marine ecologist by training, she is engaged in a wide range of scientific, teaching and public service activities to help address serious environmental problems by making the best possible information and expertise more accessible to government leaders and improving the public's understanding of ecology.
She launched the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program, now housed at the Woods Institute, in 1998 under the Ecological Society of America to help outstanding environmental scientists become more effective communicators to the public and to policy-makers, as well as the media and private sector. In 1999, she co-founded the Communication Partnership for Science and the Sea.
Susan Orr '68, MBA '70
Susan Orr is chief executive officer of Telosa Software, providing software to nonprofit organizations. She serves as chairman for the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and as a trustee for Stanford, the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health and the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
She is married to Lynn Orr '69, Stanford professor and director of the Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP). In addition to her Stanford degrees, she holds an MS ('83) from New Mexico Tech.
William J. Patterson, MBA '89
Bill Patterson is a managing partner of SPO Partners & Co., a private investment partnership that he joined in 1989. He is chairman and a director of Calpine Corporation and a director of Rosewood Hotels & Resorts.
Bill is board chair of the California Academy of Sciences, chair of the investment committee of the Marin Community Foundation, vice chair of the Stanford Business School Trust and a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute. He is a graduate of Harvard College.
George Phipps, MBA '91
George Phipps is partner with Oak Hill Investment Management L.P., a private asset management firm in Menlo Park. He is a trustee of The Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health, a member of the advisory councils for the Wildlife Conservation Society and Environmental Defense, and a former trustee of the National Outdoor Leadership School.
Kristina Emanuels Phipps, '91, JD '98
Kristina Emanuels Phipps is a former land-use lawyer and an active part-time volunteer and advocate for environmental issues. Since leaving the San Francisco land-use law firm Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger in 1999, she has co-founded the Better California Campaign, a coalition of diverse organizations that worked to improve land-use policy at the state level; helped edit a book on land-use law; and spearheaded a global warming letter-writing campaign for Environmental Defense.
At Stanford Law School, she was a member of the Order of the Coif and editor of the Environmental Law Journal.
Jay A. Precourt, '64, 'MS 65
Jay Precourt has spent his career in the energy industry. He has served as chair and CEO of Hermes Consolidated Inc., a gatherer, transporter and processor of crude oil and refined products, since 1999. He also has held executive positions at Hamilton Oil Co., Tejas Gas Corp., Shell Oil Co. (which acquired Tejas in 1997) and ScissorTail Energy LLC. He also serves as a director of Halliburton and Apache Corp. He holds bachelor's and master's degrees in petroleum engineering from Stanford and an MBA from Harvard.
Alison Wrigley Rusack '80
Alison Wrigley Rusack is the co-owner (with her husband, Geoff) of Rusack Vineyards, a 7500-case winery located in the Santa Ynez Valley. She is also an officer and director of the Santa Catalina Island Company, which handles commercial real estate, hotel and sightseeing operations on Catalina, and a lifetime member of the Benefactor Member Board for the private, non-profit Santa Catalina Island Conservancy. She graduated from Stanford University with a BA in Film and Broadcasting, after which she worked for 16 years in the entertainment industry in Southern California, most notably for Disney Consumer Products in Burbank.
She is a member of the Advisory Board of the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies and the Board of Directors of the Santa Barbara Cancer Center. She is also a former board member of the Santa Ynez Valley Foundation and the Cowboy Artists of America Museum in Texas.
Geoff Rusack
Geoff Rusack is the co-owner (with his wife, Alison) of Rusack Vineyards. He is immediate past chairman of the Board of Directors for the Santa Catalina Island Conservancy and also serves as a member of the Board of Directors for the Santa Catalina Island Company. He received his BA in Government from Bowdoin College after which he attended Pepperdine University School of Law. He began his professional career as an attorney in Santa Monica. For approximately six years, he practiced in the field of insurance defense, dealing primarily with medical and legal malpractice issues. He ultimately went into aviation law, including accident and FAA enforcement issues.
He is a member of the Board of Trustees of Bowdoin and is vice chairman of the Board of Laguna Blanca School in Santa Barbara. He has also been a member and past president of the board of the Neighborhood Youth Association in Mar Vista, CA, and was on the board of the Santa Ynez Valley Cottage Hospital Foundation.
Steve Sanderson AM '75, PhD '78
Steve Sanderson is president and chief executive officer of the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York. Prior to his appointment in 2001, he was dean of Emory College, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, at Emory University in Atlanta. He has studied the politics of rural poverty, biodiversity conservation and environmental change, and is a specialist in Latin America.
For the past 15 years, he has been deeply involved with the organization of scientific cooperation on the environment, through the Social Science Research Council, the International Geosphere-Biosphere program, the National Academy of Sciences Oversight Committee on Restoration of the Greater Everglades Ecosystem and the Scientific Board of the international Resilience Alliance. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a trustee of Fordham University.
Vicki Sant '61
Vicki Sant is co-founder and president, The Summit Foundation; The Summit Fund of Washington. She is a Stanford trustee and serves on numerous other boards, including The Community Foundation for the National Capital; Population Action International (vice-chair); The Phillips Collection; the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy; the National Gallery of Art (current president); and Vital Voices for Global Partnership.
She also is a member of the Stanford in Washington Council, the National Geographic Advisory Council, the World Wildlife Fund Council; and the Council on Population and Family Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Mel Lane (1922-2007) '45, CRT '78 (In Memoriam)
Mel Lane was a publishing consultant and environmental political activist, with a variety of interests including land use, environmental and historic preservation subjects and organizations. He was former co-publisher of Sunset magazine and books; the first chairman of the California Coastal Commission, 1972-77; and before that, the initial chairman of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission. He served on the board of directors of the World Wildlife Fund in Washington, D. C., from 1985-2005, when he was named a lifetime director; also on the boards of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and The Nature Conservancy-California. He was a founding director of the Peninsula Open Space Trust. He has served as a Stanford University trustee and as a director of Pacific Gas and Electric Company and Lucky Stores. He died at home in Atherton, Calif., on July 28, 2007. He was 85.
Melvin B. Lane, former trustee and environmental champion, dies - Stanford Report, July 31, 2007
Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods
© Woods Institute for the Environment Stanford University. All rights reserved.
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