Christine Russell ’71, MBA ’83 has been appointed chief financial officer of PDF Solutions, a leading provider of process-design integration technologies for circuit manufacturability. She brings over 25 years of corporate and financial experience to the company. 

Roger B. Menard MBA ’71 is the proud father of Matt, an EMT captain and 2017 Firefighter of the Year as well as Lindsay, a Ph.D. candidate and psychotherapist for Kaiser Permanente in Santa Rosa. He was CEO of SummerHill Homes before his retirement. 

Jim Gaffney ’71, J.D. ’75 is executive director of Doerner, Saunders, Daniel & Anderson in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He manages business operations. Previously he was corporate director of Bullivant Houser Bailey in Portland, Oregon.

Peter E. Wise ’69, MBA ’73 and his wife, Julie, moved to Taos, New Mexico, in August 2018 to enjoy the margaritas and the stars.

Hemant Thapar ’73 M.S. ’75 has been awarded the School of Engineering’s Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award for his advancement of electrical and computer science and engineering and his service to the School of Engineering. Thapar is the chairman, CEO, and co-founder of OmniTier. He previously founded and led two successful startups, DataPath Systems and Link_A_Media Devices. Together, these startups delivered many “industry firsts” in controllers for data storage and data recovery and system-on-a-chip technologies, contributing to the shipment of over 100 million chips for hard disk drives and solid state drives. Thapar received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Purdue University. He is the recipient of three best paper awards and was elected an IEEE Fellow.

Leon Panetta ’60, J.D. ’73 and his wife, Sylvia, were honored with the Distinguished Citizen Award by the San Francisco Commonwealth Club in April 2018. 

Eric Tandy ’74 is retiring from Bechtel Group in December 2018, capping a 25-year career with Bechtel and serving on the BART Earthquake Safety Program. 

Thomas Goethals ’74 was appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown ’59 to the 4th District Court of Appeal. Previously, Goethals was an Orange County District Attorney Office prosecutor and defense attorney who served on the Superior Court bench for 15 years. 

Thierry Colaw J.D. ’77, a retired Orange County Superior Court judge, has joined Judicate West, a private dispute resolution service. He spent 21 years on the bench after 20 years of private practice as a civil litigator.

Donald Temple ’78 received the lawyer of the year award from the Metropolitan Washington Area Employment Lawyers Association.

Gilbert Paul Carrasco J.D. ’78 received a Fulbright award to lecture and teach comparative constitutional rights in the human rights LL.M. program at Ukrainian Catholic University. He is a professor of law at Willamette University College of Law in Salem, Oregon and chair of the civil rights section of the American Association of Law Schools. 

Eric Bell MBA ’78 recently retired after a 35-year-career in banking that included building electronic payment systems and management consulting. 

Dennis Smolarski, S.J., ’69, M.Div., ’79, STM ’79 has been appointed as the next director of Campus Ministry. Fr. Smolarski brings unique gifts and experience to the position as an alumnus, longtime professor, and a Jesuit well aware of the changing trends in the spiritual lives of young adults today. Having taught at Santa Clara first in 1975–76 and since 1982, and serving as a resident minister for ten years, he has also led the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science and authored research in his field as well as best-selling books on Roman Catholic liturgy. 

William F. Abrams J.D. ’79 is practicing at Foster Pepper in Seattle. He is in the firm’s IP and litigation and dispute resolution practices and has served as lead counsel in over 100 patent, trade secret, and IP cases since 2000. Abrams has also been named a Top 75 IP Lawyer in California since 2009. In 2017, he successfully defended a challenge to Seattle’s tax on gun sales. Previously, he practiced at Steptoe & Johnson in San Francisco.