Rosita Ordoñez (2016) is a quality control chemist at Pharmacyclics, an AbbVie Company, in Sunnyvale. She formerly worked at Dow Pharmaceutical Sciences in Petaluma.
Chris Ott (1985) is the principal of Christopher’s Designs, a residential design studio in Santa Rosa, and the director of marketing for the International Footbag Players’ Association.
Ed Ott (2001) teaches science at Greenbrier Academy for Girls in West Virginia, He previously taught in the Philadelphia area. He earned his teaching credential in 2002 at SSU.
Benjamin J. Owen (1993) is a professor of physics at Texas Tech University. He is a member of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) team that published the first direct detections of gravitational radiation. The team has received many awards, including the Breakthrough Prize in 2016, the Breakthrough of the Year Award from Physics World in 2016 and 2017, and the Einstein Medal in 2017. Leaders of the team have received several additional prizes, including the Nobel Prize in physics in 2017. He retains an adjunct appointment at Pennsylvania State University, where he was a professor of physics and director of the Center for Gravitational Wave Physics until the end of 2014. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2013 “for leadership in understanding how neutron stars can produce gravitational waves, for creating better methods to search for these waves, and for demonstrating how gravitational wave observations can be used to probe the structure and dynamics of neutron stars.” He received his Ph.D. in physics in 1998 at Caltech, where he was awarded the Milton and Francis Clauser Doctoral Prize “awarded annually to the Caltech PhD candidate whose research is judged to exhibit the greatest degree of originality as evidenced by its potential for opening up new avenues of human thought and endeavor as well as by the ingenuity with which it has been carried out.” He was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship upon graduation from SSU.
Dan O’Donnell (1983) is the director of information security for Viking Cruises. He has held similar posiitons at Millennium Space Systems, Boeing, and the RAND Corporation.
John Palmerlee (1985) is a production engineer with The Switch Lab in Sebastopol. He has been a senior software engineer and web developer with several companies, and he is working on a novel. A pilot, he is on the board of the CAFE Foundation.
William R. Parr (1969) passed away on 23 June 2017. One of the Department’s first four graduates, he worked for many years for the County of Sonoma, ultimately as information systems project manager.
James A. Patrick (1983) is an airway transportation systems specialist with DataPath in Hawaii. He was formerly a military pilot.
Danny Paulson (2002) is a Realtor in Sebastopol. Formerly a science teacher at Maria Carrillo High School in Santa Rosa, he earned his teaching credential at Sonoma State University in 2003.
Andrew Peri (1991) is a consultant on environmental and transportation issues in Marin County. He is currently working on exposure to magnetic radiation. He has taught part-time in the Department of Geography and Human Environment at San Francisco State University, where he earned an M.A. in 2005.