Alumni Updates

Find classmates by name, major, or year of graduation

Lisa Chase (Moran), Elementary Education (Liberal Studies), 1977

Submitted: March 31, 2023

Lisa Ruth Chase (Moran) ('77, Education) passed away on October 11, 2021. Lisa and her husband, Craig Chase ('77, Fisheries), joined the Peace Corps after graduation and spent time serving in Chile. Lisa moved to Colorado in 1985 with her family where she had a 25-year career with Jefferson County Public Schools as a kindergarten and first-grade teacher. Loved by her students and fellow educators, her greatest passion was teaching children. After retiring in 2015, she continued to follow her dream as a volunteer with The Audubon Society of Denver.

Marilyn Taylor, Mathematics, 1977

Submitted: March 30, 2023

Marilyn Taylor, Women of the Year, 1976, HSU, passed away on March 15, 2023, in Spokane, Washington. Marilyn, and her 99 Humboldt State teammates, broke the old record of a 100-mile Relay Race, with the time of 12:26:13 (1976). Marilyn set the PA-AAU record for a One-Hour Run on the track (1977) and holds the Avenue of the Giants Women's Marathon record, 2:45:40 (1984), which stands today. Despite her many winning races, Marilyn Taylor felt the highlight of her track career running in the historic First Olympic Women's Marathon Trials, on May 12, 1984, in Olympia, Washington.

Sean Haas, Physics & Astronomy, 2018

Submitted: March 28, 2023

Sean Haas is currently working as a Senior Software Developer for LibSyn, Inc. He manages software for podcast statistics and large data sets. Sean also hosts and produces the Advent of Computing podcast (https://adventofcomputing.com/), a show that covers the history of computing with a special focus on untold or under-reported aspects of the story. Last year (2022) he was invited to be a keynote speaker at the Association of Computing Machinery's HUMAN'22 conference where he presented his research on the early origins of hypertext(https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3538882.3542792).

Anna Petersen, History, 2018

Submitted: March 27, 2023

Anna Petersen has returned to her native country of Hungary in 2019, along with husband Jared and son Tibby. After working for a bilingual education nonprofit in Budapest, where students learn English in a fully immersive environment with lessons co-taught by native Hungarian and English-speaking instructors, she joined the fintech company Wise in 2022 in an anti-money laundering role.

Emily Frances Klee, Environmental Resources Engineering, 2017

Submitted: March 16, 2023

After graduating from Humboldt State, Emily went off to grad school and got a Master's in Mechanical Engineering. She then moved out to Huntsville, AL, and worked at NASA in the Environmental Control and Life Support System Branch. After 2 years of loving her job, but hating the area, she decided to move to Fort Collins, CO. She is now an Operations Manager at a local non-profit food rescue, Vindeket Foods.

Mary Colleen "MC" Hannon, Zoology, 2015

Submitted: March 13, 2023

MC graduated in 2015 with a double major in Marine Biology and Zoology. During her time at Humboldt State, she was the captain of the Women's Ultimate Disc club and worked at the University Center Information Desk. On March 8th, 2023 MC successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation at Texas A&M University at Galveston with a study describing the reproductive biology of a local polychaete worm (Family Nereididae). She has accepted a postdoc position at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC where she will continue her research looking into polychaete vision in the open water column.  

Jean Ross Zedekar, Nursing, 1974

Submitted: March 6, 2023

Jean retired from hospital nursing after 47 years in 2021. She started her nursing career at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara, CA, and retired from St. John Medical Center in Longview, WA. She and her husband Steve raised two daughters, and are now happy grandparents to four grandchildren with another on the way. They love to boat, travel, scuba dive, and play pickleball. Jean looks forward to a reunion with her fellow nursing classmates for their 50-year graduation celebration.

Ingrid Hart, Journalism, 1985

Submitted: January 31, 2023

Do you remember the "Are You A Humboldt Honey" poster from 1983? To commemorate this milestone, Ingrid Hart ('85, Journalism) is reprinting the poster for the first time in 40 years. Visit: www.thehumboldthoney.com. To sweeten this feel-good project, she is donating 25% of the net profits to the North Coast Environmental Center in Arcata. She no longer lives in Humboldt but claims her memories of redwoods, rivers, and the ocean remains with her still. She claims that attending HSU in her early 20s shaped the kind of person she is today and that it was a high-vibration place to learn.

Stephen Oram "SeaCowboy", Environmental Resources Engineering, 1985

Submitted: January 26, 2023

Stephen Oram ('85, Environmental Resources Engineering) obtained his final civil engineering degree from Oregon State University in 1985 after four solid years of Environmental Engineering at Humboldt. He worked in Washington at the Bremerton Shipyard for five years, at a consulting firm in Portland Oregon for some ten years, at the Rosenburg Oregon Department of Transportation for a few years, and then at the City of Springfield Oregon for a few years. He then moved to Australia, Canberra, Cairns, Brisbane, and now Perth. Oram is now retired and surfs every day in Western Australia.   

Albert Bernales, Business Administration, 2018

Submitted: January 5, 2023

Albert Bernales ('18, Business) is among the first Peace Corps volunteers to return to overseas service since the agency’s unprecedented global evacuation in March 2020. The Peace Corps suspended global operations and evacuated nearly 7,000 volunteers from more than 60 countries at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. "My professors shared their experiences as Peace Corps volunteers during their lectures and it seemed very impactful on their own personal and professional development,” said Bernales. "As a business volunteer, I hope to share an entrepreneur's mindset with community members in Fiji and hopefully get them excited about business.”

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